Share <Embed>

Buy New

$10.88

List Price: $16.95
Save: $6.07 (36%)

FREE Shipping on orders with at least $25 of books.

Only 3 left in stock (more on the way).

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Want it tomorrow, April 23? Order within and choose Saturday Delivery at checkout. Details

Ship to:

Select a shipping address:

Buy Used

$9.95

FREE Shipping on orders over $25.

Used: Very Good | Details

Sold by bbsbargains

Fulfilled by Amazon

Condition: Used: Very Good

Comment: Softcover from 2014. Cover has some corner wear but otherwise in great shape. Tight binding. Pages are clean with no writing, underlining or highlighting. Very good copy of this book. Always HONEST and UPFRONT descriptions.

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See all 2 images

The Distance Paperback – July 7, 2015

by Helen Giltrow (Author)

64 customer reviews

See all 10 formats and editions Hide other formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$4.51

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$22.43

$1.76

$0.01

Paperback

"Please retry"

$10.88

$0.67

$0.01

Audible, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$20.36

Audio CD, Audiobook, CD, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$45.00

$14.99

Charlotte Alton is an elegant London socialite. But behind the locked doors of her sleek, fortified apartment, she becomes Karla, a fixer who specializes in creating and erasing identities, and can cover any criminal’s tracks. Only a few people in the world know her secret.

One of them is Simon Johanssen, a killer-for-hire who resurfaces—years after she helped him to quietly disappear—with an impossible job. He needs access to a high-security, experimental prison colony in order to assassinate an inmate. The catch: there’s no record of the target’s existence, and what’s worse, the criminal boss from whom he’s been hiding is inside, too. The trap has been set, but who is the real target—Johanssen or Karla herself?

The Distance

$10.88 FREE Shipping on orders with at least $25 of books. Only 3 left in stock (more on the way). Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Frequently Bought Together

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Karen Karbo

14

Paperback
$5.00
Jason Matthews

1,636

Paperback
$10.62
Ruth Ware

779

Hardcover
$16.82
Terry Hayes

5,285

Paperback
$9.52
Christopher J. Yates

216

Paperback
$9.75
Tim Johnston

1,067

Paperback
$9.49

NO_CONTENT_IN_FEATURE

Product Details

Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: Anchor (July 7, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 034580435X
ISBN-13: 978-0345804358
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (64 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #461,440 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1180 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers & Suspense > Technothrillers
- #19228 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers & Suspense > Suspense
- #27931 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

Customer Reviews

3.8 out of 5 stars

5 star		27%
4 star		36%
3 star		28%
2 star		6%
1 star		3%

See all 64 customer reviews

Share your thoughts with other customers

Write a customer review

Top Customer Reviews

High concept, hollow characters

By Maine Colonial TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on September 6, 2014

Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )

On the surface, Charlotte Alton is a cool, smooth, sophisticated young Londoner. But she has another identity, Karla, an expert in making information vanish.

One of the criminals whom Karla has helped disappear is Simon Johanssen, a military sniper who parlayed his skills into a second career as a hit man, and who needed a complete identity alteration when a mob hit he'd been hired to do went wrong. Simon comes to Karla to ask her to team up with him on a new job he has, to take out a woman in "The Program," an ultra-high-security prison in London that is an operational experiment, in that the prisoners essentially run their own community.

Karla's job is to set up an identity that will get Simon inside The Program and get him out when the job is done. But when she finds that his target doesn't seem to have any paper-trail existence, she becomes suspicious and feels compelled to find out who the target is and the reasons behind Simon's hire. To add extra tension to the plot, the mobster who has it in for Simon because of the botched hit just happens to be a current resident of The Program.

This is an impressive debut, with a complex plot that keeps you guessing right to the end, and many moments of heart-pounding tension. Though I admired the effort, I had several problems with the book that made it just an OK for me.

The story takes too long to develop, and a lot of why you're kept guessing to the end is that Giltrow makes the connections too murky. Another problem for me is that Giltrow spends a lot of time building the world of The Program, but I didn't find it very believable. I was also put off by the many scenes of gruesome, sadistic, gory violence.Read more ›

3 Comments 12 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...

Thank you for your feedback.

Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

Report abuse

I found it just okay, though certainly very good for a first novel

By Jim TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on October 26, 2014

Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )

I can only give The Distance 3 stars for "it's okay," as I found reading it all the way through kind of tedious. I would not have read the whole book had I not committed to doing so by virtue of accepting a free advance reading copy.

I can easily imagine The Distance being made into a British miniseries that, depending on the actors and production, could be very good or not. When reading it, I was somewhat reminded of a 4-episode British miniseries titled The Hidden that I watched via instant streaming, elsewhere than on Amazon, about a year ago. I often get the impression that many contemporary novelists write out of hope that their novels will be made into movie or TV productions, and I very much got that impression when reading The Distance.

There are many stock characters in The Distance and some struck me as being little more than cardboard cutouts. In some cases, the reader is given so little information about a character that no images formed in my imagination. By the end of the novel there were a few characters who I had little to no sense of and who I didn't care about. I couldn't follow everything that was happening in The Distance, and I didn't feel like it was worth making an effort to try (and I would not consider rereading it).

One character in The Distance is a first-person narrator and the author of The Distance is the third-person narrator for other characters. This calls for different voices but I often felt that the first- and third-person voices sounded too similar.

Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher novels, says in a blurb that The Distance is "fast, hard, and very, very good." It is fast, though not necessarily a page turner.Read more ›

1 Comment 5 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...

Thank you for your feedback.

Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

Report abuse

Terrific premise, stalled in execution

By Dr. Cathy Goodwin TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on September 24, 2014

Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )

I loved the premise of the book - a woman who leads two lives! So I ignored some of the warning signs in the other reviews and requested the book.

I liked the opening scene, where Karla appears in a police station. She seemed human. But almost immediately, she seemed less of a three-dimensional character and more like an automaton.

Karla is challenged to get Simon, someone from her former life, into The Program, a special experimental prison in London. That's where I started to lose interest. The prison seems highly improbable and I like my mysteries to be more real. Regardless, it was hard to feel sympathetic to Simon, who comes across as faceless and uncaring.

While the plot has been rightly described by others as "complex," I had trouble staying focused. The pace is slow, especially at the beginning, despite the violent scenes that were a little too much for me. And I didn't relate to the people or the place.

The author is talented and I'd take a chance on her next book, which hopefully will combine more realism with three-dimensional characters, at least one of whom is sympathetic.

Comment 4 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...

Thank you for your feedback.

Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

Report abuse

Good premise but I had to slog through it.

By PiperFlyer on March 26, 2015

Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

The book had an intersting and unique storyline but page-after-page-after-page went by with the feeling like something was going to happen...but nothing does. There were characters that added more confusion than substance and the ending felt flat to me.
I liked the premise though.

Comment One person found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...

Thank you for your feedback.

Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

Report abuse

Mercenaries at Play

By Antigone Walsh VINE VOICE on August 29, 2014

Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )

I went the distance and frankly wasn't much impressed. Overly long and populated with too many secondary characters, the tale features Charlotte, whose cultured existence covers her secret life as fixer. For a fee, she provides information and identification for various and sundry mercenaries. Against her better judgment she agrees to assist a hit man who needs to break into a prison to complete a hit.

Although the writing was crisp and the action scenes taut, the characters were stock and difficult to care about. Relative morality is a hard sell and with murky motives and mutable loyalties, it is a challenge to remain engaged. Narrated by the major players, it has plenty of graphic violence. The plots were all somewhat familiar, i.e., breaking into prison, the brutal prison colony presented as a progressive program, the veneers of civility. I found the longing between Charlotte and the hit man unconvincing. It would have better had there been characters worthy of emotional investment. If you enjoy clever but familiar plot devices, strong action scenes and graphic violence you will probably enjoy this book. But if you are looking for characters with depth, keep looking.

Comment 2 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...

Thank you for your feedback.

Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

Report abuse

See all 64 customer reviews (newest first)

Write a customer review

Most Recent Customer Reviews

jumbled suspence

I enjoyed this book. However, I found it difficult to follow. The writer had too many characters which I felt were poorly tracked and identified. Read more

Published 5 months ago by Keith Brubaker

Thrilling read in parts

This type of book isn't a typical book for me to read. That being said, I enjoyed the book. There were parts were I thought the plot was a bit slow, but then it would pick right... Read more

Published 6 months ago by Taylor @ Pink Heels Pink Truck

Not for the faint hearted

A rollercoaster ride in the world of crime intermingled with the world of espionage. Not a book for easy reading. You need to have your thinking cap on and this is a good thing. Read more

Published 7 months ago by Kay Smillie

Starts Strong But Becomes Too Convoluted

This book started with such promise, but faded quickly. The plot is way too convoluted and there is a large cast of characters to track. Read more

Published 8 months ago by VeggieRunners

Good luck if you like this type of book, but I simply could not keep...

Neither my wife nor I could make it past the first CD. We then waited a few months, and we restarted the audiobook, and could not make it past the second CD. Read more

Published 8 months ago by J. Fehrenbach

Debut British Thriller

That devolved, for me, to a sickeningly, unrelentingly violent with no apparent or worthwhile purpose, read - and made me want to re-read every Mrs. Pollifax I have (lol). Read more

Published 8 months ago by E. B. MULLIGAN

Great debut by the author it however was not "gripping" ...

Great debut by the author it however was not "gripping" where I couldnt put it down. I was able to walk away a few times or force myself to finish a chapter which is not... Read more

Published 9 months ago by Vicky

First-rate thriller

I was amazed by the complexity of this thriller. Often, plot-driven thrillers are weakened by the author concealing important information until the end or by hints given too... Read more

Published 10 months ago by M.A.Moore

A London socialite leads a double life - A criminal past. A hit man.

THE DISTANCE Charlotte Alton #1), debut by Helen Giltrow is a dark contemporary of a London socialite leading a double life. A secret identity. A criminal past. Read more

Published 10 months ago by Judith D. Collins

I would never recommend it.

I felt the book was too convoluted and became one gory torture scene after another, seemingly just for purposes of titillating. Read more

Published 11 months ago by paula solomon

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more

This item: The Distance

Set up a giveaway