THE VIEW FROM THE TOWER - Charles Lambert


 From the Goodreads description for this book: 

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 (sic) innocence is a very scarce commodity.

This book is billed as a psychological thriller, and there's certainly a great deal of psychological misdirection and anticipation going on here, but as for the thriller portion...? I don't know.

The biggest issue with this book is that there are no redeeming characters.  To create a thriller you need to have at least one character for whom the reader has some interest and concern - we have to want them to survive everything that's happening or about to happen to them, and author Charles Lambert does not give us that character.

If anything, that character is Federico, our victim in the early pages. Late in the book a poem by Robespierre is quoted: "The worst thing that can happen to a just man is to realise, the moment before he dies, how much he's hated by those for whom he has given his life." Is this Federico? Is this the one character with whom we bond? It's a little late for that, isn't it?

Looking for a good book? The View From the Tower by Charles Lambert is a slow moving, psychological thriller that doesn't provide a way into the hearts of any of the characters.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

2 stars

* * * * * *

The View From the Tower

author: Charles Lambert

publisher: Exhibit A

ISBN: 9781909223677

paperback, 326 pages

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