To The Last Page

Although I don’t need any convincing when it comes to Michael Robotham’s credentials as a great writer of crime fiction, I was quite impressed with the direction he had taken with Good Girl, Bad Girl and was looking forward to seeing where he would take new characters Cyrus and Evie. The murder mystery plot of the first book wasn’t Robotham’s most adventurous, owing a little to Twin Peaks , but it was clear that there were two intriguing damaged characters here that held great potential. When She Was Good however quickly shows that there is clear intent to delve further into their complicated backgrounds. Aside from the unusual talent for being able to tell when someone is lying to her, it was clear that there was a dark backstory to Evie’s Cormac’s experiences. Confined now to protective care in a children’s institution, there were indications of some kind of abuse in her past. Found in an empty house where a man had been tortured to death, Evie is clearly a damaged figure. Now appr...

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...

No-one is immune to life-changing events. Authors certainly aren’t exempt, so it’s no surprise that the concerns over personal and family issues often find their way into their work, particularly if you are writing a long-running series with a central character. Perhaps it’s inevitable then, but Robotham’s latest Joseph O’Loughlin thriller is showing signs of age, or rather showing concerns about aging and coming to terms with the past. Criminal psychologist Joe O’Loughlin certainly hasn’t been immune from life-changing events. His Parkinson’s Disease has been progressively worsening over 13 years and is controlled only by medication; his wife Julianne died 16 months previously from a blood clot; and his two teenage children are finding it difficult to come to terms with the loss of their mother, the youngest girl Emma still in a stage of denial which is manifesting in irrational behaviour and causing her problems at school. On top of all this, Joe is now hit with an even bigger family...

Michael Robotham's latest suspense thriller is not one you should even think about reading if you are an expectant mother. Stick to the mummy blogs for more practical and sanitised concerns about having and bringing up a baby, but if you happen to be in the right frame of mind and have a few hours to spare (having been forewarned that you are going to find this one difficult to put down once you've started it) you're not going to find a better plotted, more convincingly characterised or a more terrifyingly thrilling read than The Secrets She Keeps . Personally, I normally tend to think that it's far too easy for a thriller writer to rely on stirring up the fears and emotions that come with crimes that involve babies being kidnapped or placed in danger. That doesn't mean however that a good thriller can't be written around that theme, particularly when the author is willing to actually explore how deeply those sentiments sit in a woman's make-up, and even con...

I’m not sure what to make of this. Bombproof is a fun and an enjoyable thriller, but it really, really doesn’t feel like a Michael Robotham novel. Former DI Ruiz is here sure enough, and although retired he’s still the right man for the job when there is a girl missing and he’s asked to help out, but what are we to make of her brother Sami Macbeth, an ex-con just released from prison who seems to have gotten caught up in a terrorist bombing of the London Underground while trying to free her from the clutches of some dangerous and influential London gangsters? Sami’s extraordinary run of bad luck continues through a series of escalating disasters, which sees his face plastered across the TV and has everyone from half of the London underworld to the SAS and Special Terrorism Units after him on a shoot-to-kill basis. All of this however has the feel of parody, picking up on the public’s fears of terrorist bombings and the casual xenophobia and racism that lies behind it, and playing it f...

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, n...