Hurting Distance (Sophie Hannah)***

Sophie Hannah is probably best-known as a poet, and this is easy to believe from her prose. Everything she writes is beautiful, even when she is writing about some pretty horrific subjects, as very often happens in her thrillers. I don’t like violence as a rule. I’d certainly stay well away if Hurting Distance was ever made into a television serial because there is a lot of violence in the book that I really don’t want to see happening. Hannah’s writing doesn’t exactly make it any nicer or more comfortable to imagine, but there was something about it that made it very easy for me to keep reading, and to accept all the horrible things that are happening without freaking out over them.

The problem with Hurting Distance is that the crime Hannah writes about could never happen. Even assuming the plan was put into place, and a start was made on finding all the people they needed for the crime to have its full effect, it is impossible that it would have been able to continue for so many years without detection. There is too much that could have gone wrong. That said, it is definitely something of a relief to know something so terrible can’t happen.

The ‘good’ characters are very strong and very interesting, but, while they’re certainly not on the criminals’ level, they do get away with things they shouldn’t. Quite serious things, too. The ‘victim’ Naomi, does something absolutely awful that really ought to have had repercussions. The fact that her story does actually lead to the uncovering of a crime that was even worse than hers doesn’t change what she did. And that’s not the worst thing she does.

As for policewoman Charlie Zailer, she surely ought to arrest herself for the way she treats the criminals. Yes, they did terrible things, but while it is easy to sympathise with the emotions that prompt Charlie’s behaviour towards them, it doesn’t make it right, and, as a member of the police force, she should know better. But the other policeman, Simon Waterhouse, who had a starring role in Hannah’s wonderful first thriller, Little Face, is fascinating. Very weird, but a nice person. Probably the only nice person in Hurting Distance.

But somehow, none of these problems matter when you’re reading. The fact that I didn’t like most of the characters wasn’t important. The important thing was the plot, and finding out what was going to happen next. I always knew in the back of my mind that it couldn’t happen, but that didn’t make the story any less compelling. Hannah’s writing is so vivid, it’s easy to get caught up in it, and to believe it not only could happen, but it is happening as you’re reading it. Perhaps it’s set in a kind of parallel universe.

One good thing about the book’s not being completely grounded in reality is that it becomes even less predictable. Even though I figured out one major twist at what was probably the earliest point possible to do so, I never knew what was going to happen at any other time. And I always wanted to know what was going to happen because it’s a really exciting story. In theory, I have so many strong objections to the events in the story, but I found I was overcoming then almost without thinking about it because I just had to know where Hannah was going to take her characters next.