Hurting Distance by Sophie Hannah

Naomi Jenkins is a cliche.  She is having an affair with an unhappily married man, Robert Haworth, who promises to leave his wife and marry her one day.  She believes him.  They rendezvous at a roadside motel every Thursday between four o'clock and seven o'clock.

A year on, Robert vanishes into thin air, literally, thereby prompting Naomi to go on a desperate and urgent quest to find her lover.  Desperate times call for desperate actions.  She drops by Robert's house on a whim, sees something through the window and has a panic attack right there and then - what did she see?

In the meantime, Robert's wife, Juliet Haworth, seems unconcerned about his whereabouts and even fobs off the police when they come to her house to ask her some questions - why?  When the police is reticent about Naomi's story, she unleashes her own secretive past far more unnerving than you or I would ever expect...

The question is what are the consequences of Naomi's rash actions?  How much hurting distance has she allowed herself to forget a terrible past even as she is a victim of one at her own behest at the present time?

I was not so sure about Hannah's first book, The Little Face (2006), as it was not so much a crime thriller than a chiller-thriller, but Hurting Distance published in 2007 is an absolute riveting read.  Hannah is an adept writer on the downfall of the obsessive nature of love, the intricacies of human nature and the inevitable results that follow.  To use a pretty bland cliche to write a story that grips the reader from the first page is not an easy feat.  I could not see through this one at all but then, you can expect that from Hannah.  Overall, an excellently written psychological thriller, the second to feature Detective Constable Simon Waterhouse and Detective Sergeant Charlie Zailer (characters from The Little Face) - readers will be pleased to know that they feature a lot more in this book compared to the first.  I am now a fan.  I therefore highly recommend Sophie Hannah.

A video interview of the author carried out in 2007 when Hurting Distance is out in bookshops:



Rating:  5/5