Flat Over Crest

Her whole job is being believed. Four words took that away.

Ríona Faherty is a co-driver - the one in the right-hand seat, the one nobody photographs. Her work is to sit beside a man on a closed road in west Cork and read him a road he cannot see, two seconds before he arrives at it, at speeds where two seconds is ninety metres. Get it right and he is a hero. Get it wrong and you are both in a ditch, and everyone in the sport knows whose fault it was by evening.

Four years ago she got the drive of her life: one event, a world championship car, and a two-time champion in the seat beside her. On the fifth stage the car went into a wall. Afterwards, in a car park, Verner Halme said four words about her - the note was wrong - and never said another word about it again.

Nobody puts a co-driver in a car after that. Nobody did.

Now Halme has turned up in her valley to drive for a two-man team out of a converted milking parlour, and he has one condition, and the condition is her. He will not explain why. He will not take it back. What he offers instead is the only currency he has left: he cannot give her back her name, but he can put her where the sport has to look at her.

It is the worst offer she has ever had. It is also the only one.

What follows is a season - six rallies, wet roads, cold hands, an intercom four inches from her ear - and the slow, reluctant building of the most trust-dependent partnership in sport between two people who should not be able to look at each other. And somewhere in it, Ríona begins to understand that the fastest driver alive has a fault nobody can explain, that the truth about that stone wall still exists in a locked drawer in another country, and that when she finally holds it in her hand it will cost somebody everything.

A slow-burn romance about competence, blame, and the difference between being believed in private and being believed out loud. For readers who want the burn earned, the sport real, and the woman at the centre of her own story.

Some corners you cannot see around. Somebody has to tell you what is there.

If you love a partnership that is built rather than declared, a heroine who is extraordinary at a difficult job, and an ending that costs something - read this one, and then tell somebody. Books like this one live or die on being passed along, and a review is how it gets passed.