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The View from the Tower (Exhibit a) Paperback – 17 Dec. 2013

by Charles Lambert (Author)

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A psychological thriller sure to appeal to fans of William Boyd and John Le Carre...Can she trust them? Can you? Helen is in a hotel room with her lover in Rome, when a gunman murders her husband, a high-level politician, less than a mile away. Helen immediately finds herself both a suspect and suspicious of those around her including her friends and her husband s family, and her lover, Giacomo, an ex-terrorist with a new wife and a reinvented life. As Helen struggles to understand her husband s death and the extent to which she and the people she knows may have been responsible, she is forced to examine her own past and peel back the years of secrets and lies.

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"a superb, deeply thought-out book written by an author who recognizes the darkness of the human heart." - - ""Another cracking novel from Charles Lambert that transports the reader to Rome, the everyday Rome that often only the locals are 'privileged' to experience...The things I love about Charles' writing are the great style and the little vignettes that pepper the prose, whether it is the nugget of description of Helen and Federico's dream house, seen from their train compartment; or descriptions of that typical italian marble used for flooring which is ".. a sort of mottled marble, like one of those fatty salamis cut into slices and squared off into tiles" (perfect, I can visualise it now!); or the road to Ostia Antica, the Via del Mare with its dappled light and fast cars, and which is deemed to be the most dangerous road in the country. When you read Charles's work, you just KNOW you are in Italy!" - Trip Fiction "It's about a murder, and the lead up to and consequences of that act. But it's also about relationships. It's about the parts of ourselves we keep hidden, even from those closest to us." - Cheap Thrills "If you are looking for a character-driven story with a political viewpoint then this may well be the book for you to help start this new year off." - So So Gay Lambert provides a suspenseful examination of political violence, an intensely sympathetic look at love, grief and infidelity and a lovely but gritty "you are there" portrayal of Rome. Vacation season is approaching, and this is the perfect book to take to the beach when you don't want to leave your brain behind!' - The Ivy Bookshop Blog --Betty Webb, Mystery Scene Magazine

"Honest, sharp, beautifully written." --Ann Cleeves, award-winning author of the Shetland series and Vera novels

A crippling tale of love, loss, redemption, violence, and political intrigue. THE VIEW FROM THE TOWER is a slow burning crime novel that's more about retrospective relationships post death than the mystery surrounding the identity and motives of a killer." - --Just A Guy That Likes To Read

About the Author

Charles Lambert was born in England and educated at Cambridge, but has lived in Italy for more than twenty years. His short fiction has been shortlisted for the Willesden Short Story Prize and his story 'The Scent of Cinnamon' won him an O. Henry Prize. His most recent novel Any Human Face was described by the Bookseller as "immensely impressive - holds you completely enthralled throughout" and in The Telegraph Jake Kerridge described it as "a slow-burning, beautifully written crime story that brings to life the Rome that tourists don't see - luckily for them." The View From the Tower and the novel that follows will continue this suspenseful exploration of Rome's dark side.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Exhibit A
Publication date ‏ : ‎ 17 Dec. 2013
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1909223662
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1909223660
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 260 g
Customer reviews:
9 ratings

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Charles Lambert

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Charles Lambert was born in England in 1953 but has lived in Italy since 1976. His first novel, Little Monsters, a Good Housekeeping selection, was published in 2008, the same year as The Scent of Cinnamon and Other Stories, the title story an O. Henry Prizewinner. Any Human Face, his second novel was described by the Telegraph as 'a slow-burning, beautifully written crime story that brings to life the Rome that tourists don't see - luckily for them.' The View from the Tower, also set in Rome, appeared in 2012, followed in 2014 by With a Zero at its Heart, one of the Guardian's top ten books of that year.

The Children's Home, a dystopian fantasy, took readers by surprise in 2016 and was followed in 2017 by Two Dark Tales and, in 2018, by Prodigal, which explores what we do to one another in the name of love and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize. The Bone Flower, a Gothic ghost story set in Victorian London, appeared in 2022. His latest novel, Birthright, a psychological thriller, was published in April 2023.

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Weston Anita Joy
The Shadow of the Tower: all this will one day not be yours.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 February 2014
Verified Purchase

Initially thought it was an insider job, for Italy-dwellers only, but then realized it was a hothousing of the reader, to lock them into something, not just at plot-level -- I personally don't "do" plot -- they weren't going to want to get out of. In any case, its presentation of the terrorist years in Italy informs, intrigues, and should interest anyone who was alive, in Europe, and in possession of a social awareness then and now. Read disingenuously: characters and situations are almost always slightly skewed, and emotions sometimes come at you from a few feet to the side of where you're expecting them. Watch that Giulia. Climb the tower slowly.
- the plot? Oh that. That's fantastic!

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Amazon Customer
Disappointing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 June 2014
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I thought this would be the ideal novel for me as I know Italy well and lived and worked there in the 1970s. At that time the extreme political elements of the Neo-fascists and Marxist Red Brigades were struggling for supremacy and atrocities such as the bombings in Milan and Brescia and the kidnap and murder of Aldo Moro and others took place. The author has, I understand, lived in Italy for a long time and obviously has a good knowledge of the country.

The novel switches between now and those times and explores the changes in the lives and relationships of several characters. Particularly the impact of acts committed then, on individuals who have moved on in life. The central character is the wife of a politician who is murdered at the start of the story.

Sadly I found the book unsatisfying. The plot was good but the characters remained shallow, so that I didn't really care what happened to them. The identification of the person responsible for the murder seemed to happen in a brief revelation and the novel finished so abruptly that I was left looking for the next chapter. Possibly the very short flashbacks didn't work well because they didn't allow any atmosphere of those times to be created. They seemed just like a device to explain the plot.

I wish I could be more positive about it but I feel like it was an opportunity for a really good novel which just didn't make it.

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Charlie Hill
A tale of loss, loyalty and wine...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 May 2014
This is a nicely judged tale of intrigue and sexual politics, that starts off as a thriller and morphs into a meditation on youth and loyalty and loss. The sense of place is very strong and although the politics are ever-present, they never threaten to overwhelm the more basic pleasures of life (don't read this if you're thinking of giving up cheese or wine...); in this respect, it reminded me of the Barcelona-set novels of Manuel Vazquez Montalban. Prose-wise, Lambert wears his obvious erudition lightly and puts it to good use in series of illuminating asides and observations: 'He wants, he realises, to call the woman widowed. There's no word for a woman who's lost her child, it occurs to him, perhaps because it should never happen, it goes against the natural order. But it happens all the time. The emperors make it happen, and their advisors. Perhaps there was a word for it in Latin, in Ancient Rome, he thinks, when it must have been needed all the time.'
Lovely stuff...

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Marleen
Darkly human
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 January 2014
I received my copy from the publisher through NetGalley

Over two years ago I read "Any Human Face" by Charles Lambert and was very impressed by this, at the time, new to me author. That book was the first one in a planned trilogy about the darker side of Rome. "The View from the Tower" is the second title in that trilogy and impressed me even more than the first one did.

Just like "Any Human Face" this is a literary thriller. Even though Helen's husband is murdered at the start of the story the emphasis isn't immediately on why or by whom he was killed. In fact, the first part of this book appears to concentrate on Helen and her feelings of guilt, loss, confusion and denial as she takes a closer look at her husband of 30 years and the relationship she had with him. Her feelings are complicated by the fact that for all of those 30 years Helen has had an affair with her husband's best friend, Giacomo, the man she was visiting in his hotel room while her husband was being killed a short distance away.

As Helen struggles to understand her husband's death and the extent to which she and the people she knows may have been responsible for it, she is forced to examine her own past and peel back the years of secrets and lies. It is while Helen takes a closer look at her life, the events that took place in the past and the feelings she has for the two men in her life that the reader and Helen get an understanding of what has happened and why events took the turn they did.

This is an intricate story. While on the surface it deals with politics, revolution, violence, murder and conspiracies this is also, or predominantly, a story about relationships, the secrets we keep from each other, no matter how close we imagine ourselves to be to our partner, and the shock of discovering after 30 or more years together that you really didn't know the person you were sharing your life with - or they you - as well as you thought you did.

The descriptions of Helen's struggles while coming to terms with her loss are heartbreakingly real. Those short moments of forgetting that the person who was such an integral part of your life is no longer there and the renewed pain of loss when you remember, are vivid and recognisable. I also liked that there are no heroes and no real villains in this book. Actions taken for all the right reasons may still prove completely wrong under closer scrutiny. This is a brutally honest book. None of the characters are portrayed in a flattering light; all of them have their shortcomings and most of them are well aware of that fact. These characters are as real as the people we meet from day to day in our real lives. As a result it took me some time to take to any of them. By the end of the book though I had come to like most of these characters exactly because they were so brutally realistic.

This is a thriller in which the tension is insidious rather than obvious, an undertone rather than in the readers face. Even when the story appears to be only about Helen's wildly varying emotions the tension is there, just under the surface. The reader is constantly aware that whatever is going on it won't be something simple, and while it doesn't appear that the narrative is steering us in the direction of a solution, that is exactly what is happening. Every conversation and action - both past and present - has significance even when they appear unrelated to the mystery of who committed the murder.

Charles Lambert has produced an intriguing thriller that kept me guessing until the very end; a story that isn't always easy to read but very rewarding once it all comes together. This is an author who is not afraid to portray people as they are, warts and all, and manages to make his readers care about them even when their actions are questionable. I'm in awe of this author's writing and eagerly awaiting the third book in this Rome trilogy. I couldn't have wished for a better start to my reading year.

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