Harm

By: Hugh Fraser

Narrated by: Annie Aldington

Acapulco, 1974: Rina Walker is on assignment. Just another quick, clean kill. She wakes to discover her employer's severed head on her bedside table and a man with an AK-47 coming through the door of her hotel room. She needs all her skills to neutralise her attacker and escape. After a car chase, she is captured by a Mexican drug boss who exploits her radiant beauty and ruthless expertise to eliminate an inconvenient member of the government.

Notting Hill, 1956: Fifteen-year-old Rina is scavenging and stealing to support her siblings and her alcoholic mother. When a local gangster attacks her younger sister, Rina wreaks violent revenge and murders him. Innocence betrayed, Rina faces the brutality of the postwar London underworld - a world that teaches her the skills she needs to kill....

Hugh Fraser is best known for playing Captain Hastings in Agatha Christie's Poirot and the Duke of Wellington in Sharpe. His films include Patriot Games, 101 Dalmatians, The Draughtsman's Contract and Clint Eastwood's Firefox.

In the theatre he has appeared in Teeth'n'Smiles at the Royal Court and Wyndhams and in several roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has also narrated many of Agatha Christie's novels as audiobooks. Harm is his first novel.

©2015 Hugh Fraser (P)2016 Aduible Studios

A compelling story

Three cheers for Rina! She makes the best of the situations in which she finds herself. Yep, this one will have you sitting in the parking lot, not wanting to click "pause."

Good Story (warning sex + violence graphic)

On the good side you have a strong , fearless, female character,
and good action packed story.

Captain Hastings sheds his good guy persona.

Pretty sure most authors could write a story like this. Sure, some of the backstory was poignant but the gratuitous sex, rape and violence are merely thrown together in search of a meaningful tale. And you can almost feel when Fraser hits the writers block wall cuz time and again someone will show up throwing indiscriminate bullets around that remove the literary obstacles so the heroine can proceed. And he makes sure to check all the PC boxes- every single adult male character (except perhaps the gay one in the the end) is odious. Every one! And only sapphic love is meaningful. Truly cardboard characters that are paper thin. It just feels to me like Fraser is desperately trying to divorce himself from the clean-cut image of his signature character. It's a shame because I feel like he has the chops to do that without churning out a nihilistic gutter tale.