To The Last Page

Good Girl, Bad Girl is a change of pace and slight shift in direction for Michael Robotham; the beginning of a new series with new characters. The main character providing the first-person perspective in this latest book is Cyrus Haven, a police psychologist, which might sound very much like Robotham’s lead character Joe O’Loughlin at first. That looks like the author trying to find a new way of revisiting criminal psychology now that O’Loughlin’s Parkinson’s has become too severe for him to continue to be a viable operative (but what a run he’s had), but it soon becomes clear there’s another intriguing character here who changes the whole tone of the book and the idea of a new series quite considerably. As far as determining who the good girl and bad girl of the title goes, there are indeed two young girls in the novel, but which one is good and which is bad could be subject to change. Initially we discover that popular and talented 15 year old Jodie Sheehan has been sexually assault...

“ There’s been an accident at Bear Lake ”. There’s a tragic inevitability to this sentence which comes half-way through William Prendiville’s beautiful little novella, Atlantic Winds . The signs are there early on in how the story of Tom and Sasha is related, the tentative beginnings of their youthful love and the circumstances of their lives in Bear Lake simultaneously too strong and yet too fragile to withstand what is ahead. So when that sentence comes, it feels like you’ve been waiting on it with a horrible sense of foreboding and trepidation. The fact that you are anxious about the fate of these characters is very much down to the quality of the writing, which is direct and unpretentious and not as grim as that warning might have made it sound. It’s a style that is in tune with the age group of the young people involved, Tom only 14 when he first sees Sasha, and sees something in her that he doesn’t see in anyone else, and something that others haven’t yet seen in Sasha. It’s that...

You’re likely to have a few questions and doubts about how an extreme form of chain-letter is sustainable in The Chain , but you’ll likely be inclined to put off the whys and hows for a while and trust that Adrian McKinty will get you there, because like Rachel in the book, all you are really going to care about is getting to the end of the current tense situation without it all ending badly. Well, it’s definitely going to end badly, it’s just a matter of how badly and for whom. The Chain has all the characteristics of the chain letter mixed with a pyramid scheme. Rachel’s dilemma is that her daughter Kylie has been kidnapped by someone whose own child has been kidnapped. To have Kylie released, Rachel not only has to pay a ransom, she has to kidnap another child as well. And so on. It’s a devious idea since whoever is behind the Chain gets the money and takes none of the risks of doing the kidnapping. Evidently there are considerable risks, since it means that ordinary people have to...