Shatter - Michael Robotham

The book’s title is the description of the sound made by a mind that has been broken, and Robotham brings the full horror of that to bear in his latest novel. What are the buttons that can be pushed to mentally destroy a person and what kind of monster is capable of doing it? If he is capable of understanding this, clinical psychologist Joe O’Loughlin just might be able to get closer to the answer of why a killer has driven a number of women to their deaths.

The first victim is a naked woman in red heels who jumps from the Clifton Suspension Bridge despite the best efforts of the professor, who has recently moved to the area with his wife and two daughters. Unable to understand what could have motivated the woman to apparently kill herself, Joe suspects that someone may have driven her to her death – the voice on the other end of a mobile phone she was holding at the time. The police are sceptical about Joe’s theory, so he calls in an old friend - former Chief Inspector Vincent Ruiz, now retired.

It’s a bit of a cliché, but inevitably the question of “we’re not so different” comes up between the killer who manipulates minds and the psychologist who tries to analyse and in some respects control them. To compound the cliché, Robotham is not so different either, as he once again he finds a very real fear that any reader will identify with and manipulates it to create a tense and dramatic situation, one heightened by the vulnerability of his characters through Joe’s Parkinson’s Disease and in his domestic situation with his wife. If in this respect, the serial killer investigation makes Shatter more of a conventional thriller than Robotham’s previous books, it’s nonetheless just as effective and involving and the consequences are no less serious.