I always enjoy a Rebecca Chance book, I'm huge fan and jumped right into this latest offering. To say I loved this would be an understatement, it's one of those books that once you start you can't be away from it. Highly addictive and full on from beginning to end.

Wow! I felt completely exhausted after reading Mile High. There was always something going on, and left you guessing till right towards the end as to who the stalker was. I had no idea it was going to be (oh no, you didn’t really think I was going to spoil it did you?) Despite the cult that has grown up around Condon, he is not really a great novelist, and certainly makes no pretensions about the value of his work. But as a practitioner of the fiction of information, no one else comes close to him....I was also a little confused by the author adding chapters about other characters that seemed to bring nothing to the book, as they had nothing to do with the plot. I guess I know what was the purpose of this, as Ms Chance was here and there adding some information that may be misleading for the reader, that may shake their opinion and that may make them change their minds about the characters and guessing, who the stalker is - I truly didn't know who is the stalker, and thanks to those extra information about different characters I was changing my opinion about who it can be. Catalina, one of the celebrities had to deal with a lot throughout the flight. Her stalker is on board and that added a lot of mystery. I changed my mind about who the stalker was several times. There's an almost claustrophobic feel about this story.Whilst the description of the Luxe pods with their cashmere slippers and leather beds are wonderful, the reader is aware that there is nowhere for the characters to hide. They are cocooned, within the confines of the plane for the ten hour flight and this adds a tension to the plot. I loved the bitchy comments that came out from some of the cabin crew, comments that Judge Rinder would have been proud of! In fact, I think I would have quite liked to work that flight! When the characters were already talking (although mostly I had a feeling that this book is one long narration, as so few interactions took place there) I wasn't sure if they are eventually going to come to a conclusion, because there was so much inner monologuing between the lines that I really mostly lost my hope to get to the point sometime.

In Mile High, the basic theme of all 26 of Condon's books is summed up in a single angry cri de coeur: Mile High is my first book by Rebecca Chance, but I had heard great things about her previous books so I was really excited to start it. The first that caught my attention in this book was its third person narrative. It was told from multiple points of views but it had a bit of an impersonal touch, so it was difficult for me to really connect with the characters. I felt, at the beginning, as if I was reading a very long magazine article rather than a book. But once I got used to this style and started knowing all the key characters better, I started enjoying the story a lot more. And I have to admit that with this narrative, it was totally impossible to guess who the stalker was, so Rebecca managed to keep me wondering until the very last minute.At the New York Times, Pete Hamill, who has since had a long career as a journalist, columnist, and novelist, was favorably impressed by it except, perhaps, as a work of fiction. The very long chapters didn't help either, I felt there was too much narration and too little dialogue and the pacing was very slow. I'm glad I read this book and I'm not easily giving up on this author, as I've heard her previous novels are much better. But if you're new to Rebecca's writing, maybe it's better to read some of them and leave this one for later, or if you're into bonkbusters I wholeheartedly recommend 'Scandalous Lies' by Nigel May.

Rebecca Chance, you're wonderful - I'm now officially a fan, and your books will be an essential part of my luggage for every future holiday.

Then we have the crew who is so bitchy that they seemed more entertaining than the actual entertainers on the flight. There are different levels of crew depending on which airline they work for and it creates a class difference. Crew working for high-class airline look down on the crew working on budget airlines. The plot becomes more operatic as it goes along. One of the large weaknesses of the book, as fiction, is that we never feel anything about Eddie West himself, not even loathing. But Condon makes his opera believable, because he is the best of the practitioners of what might be called the New Novelism... Condon applies a dense web of facts to his fiction. Eddie West walks corridors with Warren Harding; he meets frequently with Paul Kelly, one of the actual bosses of the early Mafia; he talks with Al Capone and Johnnie Torrio. Condon has a mania for absolute detail that reminds you frequently of Ian Fleming.... Condon's great and nourishing strength has always been his mania for mania. The mushy midsection of the human-behavior range has no interest for him, and ordinary psychosis not much more. What grips his imagination, and shakes it till splendid words fall out, is the tic of a human bomb.... Throw in a bit of humour to the heady plot, combine with some potent pills and you have an inflammatory mix of personalities and situations. The head of the crew, Lucinda is having an affair with the pilot and gets jealous when the pilot starts to flirt with the new female member of the crew, Angela. Lucinda sets out to get revenge from Angela and defame her as a whore when she sees the celebrity chef being interested in Angela.

Curiously enough, it was published within a few months of a somewhat similar novel about multi-generational New York gangsters, The Godfather, by a relatively unknown author, Mario Puzo. Puzo and his book went on to worldwide renown, and while Mile High was received reasonably well, it did little to enhance Condon's reputation. This would have to wait a further two decades for his quartet of novels about the Prizzi family and its Hollywood adaptation, Prizzi's Honor. I absolutely love this author, as I always know that when a read one of Rebecca's books, I know that I'm in for a treat. Pure indulgence on so many levels, it's got everything. Everything was tied at the end nicely. As always, it was full of scandals, mysteries (even though a bit disappointing), sex and glamour. Overall, I enjoyed the book. Mile High was the eighth book by the American satirist and political novelist Richard Condon, first published by Dial Press in 1969. Internationally famous at the time of its publication, primarily because of his 1959 Manchurian Candidate, Condon had begun to lose the respect of critics with the publication of his last few books and the one-time, so-called Condon Cult was mostly a thing of the past. Like his fifth book, An Infinity of Mirrors, Mile High is a consciously ambitious work, primarily concerned with the establishment of Prohibition in the United States, and Condon researched it thoroughly. The first two-thirds of the book, in fact, reads as much like a lively history of New York City gangsterism from the mid-18th century through 1930 as it does a novel.

For Eddie West, power was all that mattered," by Pete Hamill, The New York Times, August 31, 1969, at [2] The story is for the most part set inside an airplane, on the inaugural flight of Pure Air's LuxeLiner from London to Los Angeles. Passengers would normally already bathe in luxury beyond anything offered by competitive aviation companies, but as this is their very first flight promoting the exorbitant services they're going a step further with the publicity campaign and they've roped in a group of celebrities to be the first to enjoy the full-sized sleeping pods, freshly steamed lobsters and the rest of the decadence offered in the air.