‘The Contest’ by Karen Hamilton

Published by Wildfire,
20 July 2023.
ISBN: 978-1-4722-7943-9 (HB)

For most people a holiday is a time-out, a break from the daily round – but that doesn’t always mean relaxing in beautiful surroundings. Sometimes it’s a time to face an unusual challenge, to see how far it’s possible to stretch one’s horizons. So it is on the Great Escape, an annual event in the  lives of BVT, a travel agency which specializes in organizing one-off, made-to-measure trips for people with the kind of money that makes the cost irrelevant. This year’s Great Escape is the biggest challenge so far; they’re climbing Kilimanjaro.

For the employees of BVT who accompany the expedition, there’s an extra layer of challenge in every Great Escape. The clients are divided into two teams, and for the leaders it becomes a contest with a lot at stake. The winner is feted and rewarded; the loser is in danger of losing his or her job as well as the contest. And this year it’s a needle match; one team leader is the son of the agency’s owner, the other is his half-sister – but he doesn’t know they are related, and she has only just found out.

The journey is charted from start to finish by Jacob, the son, and Florence, his half-sister, in alternate chapters. Jacob soon reveals himself as self-seeking, entitled, slightly feckless, a gambler. Until now, hardworking Florence believed she had earned her job through merit, but suddenly has cause to wonder. As the climb progresses emotions run high, and questions, and eventually answers, emerge about previous Great Escapes, especially last year’s, when a tragic accident put in one team leader in a coma – and the other leader from that trip is now a member of Florence’s team.

As if climbing nearly 20,000 feet wasn’t enough of a challenge, there are clashing personalities, rivalries with other companies and fluctuating weather conditions to deal with, all portrayed in the kind of detail that brings the trip into sharp focus and makes you feel every discomfort and uneasiness along with the characters – all of who are equally well depicted, if almost universally not the kind of people you’d choose to be on holiday with. You sort of know there’ll be tears before bedtime (or summit time), and not just for the loser, and you can’t stop reading to find out for who, and why.

The Contest isn’t really a murder mystery, though there’s a body or two along the way; but it’s loaded with the kind of edge-of-the seat tension that adds up to a cracking good thriller.
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Karen Hamilton spent her childhood in Angola, Zimbabwe, Belgium and Italy and worked as a flight attendant for many years. Karen is a recent graduate of the Faber Academy, and having now put down roots in Hampshire to raise her young family with her husband, she satisfies her wanderlust by exploring the world through her writing.

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.