The Interview by C M Ewan
| The Interview by C M Ewan | |
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| Category: Thrillers | |
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Reviewer: Sue Magee
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| Summary: The story is compressed into less time than it will take you to read it but you'll never be off the edge of your seat. A good read. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 448 | Date: February 2022 |
| Publisher: Macmillan | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1529095524 | |
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Kate Harding is going for an interview for her dream job at Edge Communications. It's the last interview of the day at one of London's newest office buildings and Edge have fitted out their part of the building to be something special. Maggie, Kate's recruitment agent, is keen to see that Kate approaches the interview in a good state of mind: Kate assumes that this is because Maggie will get a decent bonus if Kate gets the job - and she has to admit that life has not been easy for her recently.
Her husband was killed in the MarshJet air disaster some fifteen months ago and coming to terms with his death and trying to rebuild her life has been difficult. Recently she's been working at Simple PR in a job that was almost created for her by the owners, Simon and Rebecca. She feels guilty about looking for another job but she needs to do something which will challenge her - and she's not getting that at Simple PR.
The interviewer is Joel White and Edge's receptionist excitedly tells her that he's flown in from the New York office to do the interviews. The staff are all trying to find out if he's single! It's perhaps a good thing that Kate doesn't know that Joel has flown in from Shanghai and that the name on the paperwork was very different. Kate's going to be on her own in the office with White: the rest of the staff have gone home and most of the other offices in the building are not yet occupied.
The interview began well. Kate's brother, Luke, had helped her to prepare some of the expected subjects but the questions gradually became more and more intrusive and very much too personal for Kate's liking. It all seemed to come back to the death of Kate's husband and the MarshJet disaster. Had Kate looked around carefully when she arrived at the interview, she's have seen Joel White in conversation with the rather sinister Sir Fergus Marsh, CEO of MarshJet.
The action all takes place in the space of a few hours: it will take you longer to read the book! Please try and remember to breathe: it's all too easy to get so engaged in the story that you forget. The plotting is superb and the pace never lets up. Everything that happens seems to follow logically from what has gone before and it's easy to see why Kate is torn between answering the questions in the hope of getting the job and walking away from the situation.
There's only one problem: Kate is not going to be allowed to walk away.
I enjoyed The Interview very much. The characterisation is excellent. It was easy to empathise with Kate after all that she's been through: you want her to succeed, to be able to rebuild her life. It's still early days in the passage of grief but you admire that she's trying to improve her life rather than wallowing in self-pity. Strangely enough, I found myself respecting Joel White. He's there to do a job (and it's not a job that many of us would want) but sometimes you spot a little concern for Kate creeping in.
I finished the book far too quickly and I'll be interested to see what C M Ewan writes next. I'd like to thank the publishers for allowing Bookbag to have a review copy.
If this book appeals, then you might also enjoy Invite Me In by Emma Curtis.
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