The High Flyer

The High Flyer by Howatch, Susan. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780375410574.

Carter Graham is a successful, financially secure London lawyer in her mid-thirties, a partner in her firm. She has the perfect clothes, the perfect car, the perfect apartment and, as of a few months ago, the perfect husband. She is perfectly on track, exactly where she hoped to be at this point in her life. Except that reality is about to change her course. Carter slowly begins to learn that her husband, Kim, is not what he seems. People from his past hint at a serious involvement in the occult and at a connection between his family and the Nazis. Carter has a disturbing encounter with the "psychic healer" who warned Kim against their marriage; and, even more alarming, with what seems to be the ghost of Kims ex-wife, recently deceased in a suspicious accident. Kim grows more and more cagey in his explanations for his increasingly devious behavior. Bit by bit, everything Carter thought she knew about him--and about herself--is called into question. Her world shattering--is she going mad?--Carter plunges into a darkness and terror she has never known before. In desperation, pushing past her long-held scepticism, she seeks shelter and help at St. Benets Healing Centre. Now, with the aid of the people who run the Centre--Father Nicholas Darrow, a mysteriously alluring healer; Father Lewis Hall, Darrows down-to-earth counterpart; Alice, the magnificent cook and all-round angel of mercy; and Tucker, a lay worker whose interest in helping Carter is both altruistic and deeply personal--Carter begins a psychological and spiritual journey that will bring her to a startling understanding of Kim and, more important, of her own life, past and future. Following in the tradition she has so brilliantly made her own, Susan Howatch once again gives us a novel that weaves together the ecclesiastical and the earthly in an electrifying, masterfully told story.