High Flyer

The story is more exciting adventure than a religous story, as the Starbridge novels were. Howatch said some time ago that she had done a set of novels about the Church and its clergy, set in earlier days when "clergymen were gentlemen" and when the Church was a lot more formal. She hasn't been writing for many years and I imagine that she's in poor health, but she did indicate some time ago that having "Done" novels on the church and clergy, she did not want to revisit that field again. However, the novels tend to give a picture of people who are outside the Church.. and often hostile to Christianity, but they usually wind up revealing that being outside church life has led them to evil paths. So there seems to be an implication that Howatch thinks that being non religious may well mean that people end up not as commonplace ordinary people who are averagely selfish, but that they will get into serious trouble morally speaking. She is realistic about people within the church and knows that they are often far from wonderful people, but she has a tendency to over write and to show up non Christians or anti Christians as treading a dangerous path. In the second novel High Flyer, Carter gets trapped in a house with her dangerous husband, whom she has encouraged to tell her about his past. When he comes out with the story of how he had to kill his blackmailer, she realises that he may now decide that he has to kill her to stop her going to the police. Eric Tucker who works at the Centre, is in love with her, and he has followed her to the country house and helps her to escape. She gets back to London to find that Kim has gone back to their flat to get his passport so he can leave the country, but the police catch up with him and to escape them, he jumps off the balcony of their high rise luxury flat. Mrs Mayfield disappears and the police cannot find her. Carter goes through a difficult period of trying to work out why he wound up in this world of occultism, weird sexual practiices and general evil, and why she married such an awful man. She feels she can't trust Eric Tucker though she cares for him. Eventually she comes to a point of being able to forgive Kim and to at least trust Eric enough to go out with him. She has inherited a lot of money from Kim, and decides to become a volunteer for the centre....