The View from the Tower

by Charles Lambert

"Can she trust them? Can you?" A psychological thriller about love and betrayal, and the damage done when ideals and human lives come into conflict. Helen is in a hotel room with her lover when a gunman murders her husband, Federico, a high-level civil servant, less than a mile away. Helen soon finds herself entangled in a web of suspicion that involves those closest to her - Federico, his parents, and her friend and lover, Giacomo, an ex-terrorist with a new wife and a reinvented life in Paris. As Helen struggles to understand her husband's death and the extent to which she and the people she knows and loves may have been responsible for it, she is forced to examine her own past and the world in which she lives - and to realise innocence is a very scarce commodity.

• ISBN10: 1909223689
• ISBN13: 9781909223684
• Publish Date: 28 January 2014 (first published 1 January 2013)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Exhibit A
• Format: eBook
• Pages: 196
• Language: English

Reviews

[Lianne]

The following review was posted in its entirety at my blog, caffeinatedlife.net: http://www.caffeinatedlife.net/blog/2014/01/07/review-the-view-from-the-tower/

I was approved of an ARC of this title from the publishers via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The View from the Tower is an intriguing novel in that there is a lot going on underneath the surface, a lot of things that Helen had no idea about. It’s interesting and startling in that, as the reader is learning about these things from Helen’s perspective, the reader also realises that Helen was pretty much out of the loop the whole time.

However, I found that I never really connected with any of the characters; I didn't care how their story was going to wind up at the end. I found Helen to be rather frigid and just somehow found herself in a complex web of relationships. I wish the author had also fleshed out her flashback scenes with Federico because I never once got the sense that Helen truly cared enough about Federico–and vice versa?–to understand why she chose him and stayed with him for as long as she did. I just wasn’t convinced, which made the later scenes especially disconnecting.

Overall The View from the Tower was an okay read for me. The plot wasn’t as thrilling as I thought it would be and at times the story seemed to stall, it felt rather narrative-dense. However I enjoyed the segments involving Italian politics and the political scene during the 1970s.