‘Never Far Away’ was an entertaining read that kept surprising me but sometimes in a way that left me a little frustrated at the path chosen.

The thing I enjoyed most about the book was that the two main characters were slightly off-centre. They were believable but unpredictable. The only thing they had in common was that they were both dangerous.

Firstly, there’s Nina Morgan, now known as Leah Trenton. She’s not the normal surprisingly-competent-mom-in-peril that thriller writers love. She is competent: a qualified Maine Guide at home in the wilderness, a licensed pilot and a good shot, but she’s mainly a woman so deeply enmeshed in lies that she no longer knows how to tell the truth. She’s been living a lie for a decade since she faked her own death and abandoned her infant children. When circumstances forced her to re-enter their lives, she continued to lie to her children, introducing herself as their dead mother’s sister and then whisking them off to a new life. Her lies put the children and her partner, who’s only known her as Leah Trenton, in danger but she still can’t bring herself to tell the truth. The impact of this fundamental dishonesty drove a lot of the action of the book and created an ambiguous moral tone that I enjoyed.

Then there’s Dax Blackwell, the ultra-competent, cool-in-a-crisis hitman. At first, I thought he’d be the contract-killer-with-a-moral-code who would risk everything to save the mom-in-peril and her adorable, brave and innocent children. After all, there are a few versions of that character in top selling Thriller series. I was delighted to find that Blackwell was more complicated than that. He does have a professional code for doing business, one that he learnt at his father’s knee, but it doesn’t involve rescuing people or putting himself at risk for no reward. He’s someone who tries hard to be a rational man who takes decisions without being swayed by emotions. I liked that, although his actions almost always seemed rational to Blackman, they often came as a surprise to me. It took me a long time to work out that Blackman really wasn’t on anybody’s side but his own. This meant that I could never be sure who he would help and who he would hurt but I knew that, whenever he was involved, someone would die.

These two wildcards interact with well-drawn versions of people you’d hope to meet in any good thriller: an evil billionaire and his two hard-hearted assassins, a bright, brave but distrustful and unhappy teenage daughter determined to protect her cute but useless little brother, a boy-next-door-with-a-crush who is in danger of being collateral damage, Nina/Leah’s almost-too-nice-to-be-true young partner and his loyal dog.

I had fun with this novel but, in the end, I found Blackman’s unpredictability a little unsatisfying. I believed in the outcomes but I wasn’t swept along by them.

To me, it felt as if the novel moved quite slowly at the start but that might be because I started with the audiobook version of ‘Never Far Away’ and ended up returning it by the end of Chapter 5 because the narrator, Robert Petkoff, kept emoting all over Michael Koryta’s prose, seemingly trying to squeeze some melodrama out of a story that didn’t need it. 

Once moved to the ebook version, I was more comfortable and could appreciate the hard-edged dispassion with which the violence and death that peppers the book were described.

The final big confrontation scene of the book had me on the edge of my seat. I had no idea how it was going to go and who, if anybody, would survive. Even so, when the cards were shown and the survivors were known, I found the ending a little abrupt. I think Michael Koryta wanted to end on an adrenalin high rather than get bogged down in a here’s-what-happened-to-eveyone-aftwards chapter. Maybe he was right but it surprised me.