I’m in that glorious period when the next book is a Platonic ideal, built up in my imagination, but I haven’t actually started the work of writing it yet. I’m plotting, and finding character names, and staring at geography and, in this particular instance, watching boxed sets of ‘Spiral’, the fantastic French police thriller series that’s like Lewis on steroids, laced with a strong Burgundy and a lot more sex. Yes, I am in love with Laure. And yes, my beloved knows this…
In amongst all of this, I’m reading around the subject and in this case, that’s a pretty wide scope because the new book will not only be set in a new historical period (fifteenth century France) but will have a contemporary thriller thread - hence the Spiral-watching. Hence also the request to my agent for recommendations of good, solid, well written, sharp, cutting-edge thrillers. ‘Who’s going to be huge in 2-3 years’ time?’ I need to see where we’re at.
In amongst some others, he recommended ‘Shatter’ by Michael Robotham - whom he also represents: that’s the full disclosure coda at the start. But I’m not into writing reviews for people simply because we share an agent: that way lies disaster and an end to review-integrity. I’m writing this, because, yet again, I was up until after 2am finishing this and woke this morning glad that I did because otherwise I’d have lost half a working day having to finish it (when, instead, I could be watching series 2 of Spiral and calling it work).
This is the book blurb:
A naked woman in red high-heeled shoes is perched on the edge of Clifton Suspension Bridge with her back pressed to the safety fence, weeping into a mobile phone. Clinical psychologist Joseph O’Loughlin is only feet away, desperately trying to talk her down. She whispers, ‘you don’t understand,’ and jumps.
Later, Joe has a visitor - the woman’s teenage daughter, a runaway from boarding school. She refuses to believe that her mother would have jumped off the bridge - not only would she not commit suicide, she is terrified of heights.
Joe wants to believe her, but what would drive a woman to such a desperate act? Whose voice? What evil?
If I had blurb this unexciting, I’d sack my editor and find a new one, but that apart, it does give the gist of the book: Someone is talking women to their deaths - their fates become more elaborate and nastier as the plot unfolds - and our hero is Professor Joe O’Loughlin, a forensic psychiatrist who has Parkinson’s disease as his added interest. Dragged unwilling into the case, he has to find out who’s doing this and why before his own family falls apart under the pressure.
I have to say that none of this sounds overly promising: every single police procedural these days seems to have a psycho-acadamic at loggerheads with the police and there are only so many variations on human wounded-ness you can manage: drink, drugs, depression, divorce… before they all seem to blend into one another.
But this one stands head and shoulders above the rest. As with all good books, it’s the characterisation that does it: fully rounded people who keep stepping out of their stereotypes (the lesbian DI is wonderfully good), but added to that is Robotham’s exceptional sense of place - in this case, the area around the Avon Gorge, Bristol and Bath. For someone who lives in Australia, he has a good handle on the south west. And he’s intelligent: a former journalist who can clearly do exceptional research but then integrate it into the story so that it feels integral, not tacked on to prove how much time he spent on Google before he started writing. His language is sharp, fast and funny - genuinely funny. When so many other lad-cop writers seem to have a deeply irritating nasal chortle as their writing voice, Robotham’s is dryly ironic, but sharply, beautifully, interestingly observant.
And then there’s his bad guy. He’s followed Val McDermid’s lead in this and we have occasional short deviations from the first person present tense narrative of Joe O’Loughlin into the head of the perpetrator. They’re in italics, which helps, because while they’re not nearly as disturbing as McDermid’s monster in ‘The Mermaids Singing’, they are none the less deeply affecting. In part this is because the inevitable threat to our hero is made a great deal more immediate when we can see the plot unfolding, but in main, it’s because the bad guy’s past history as a torturer - sorry, interrogator - sent to the unmentionable, forgettable, forgotten prisons of recent wars to drag information from unwilling victims is so utterly plausible, so inevitably damaging and so completely covered up by the authorities when their hens come home to roost, that it left my left-wing, progressive anti-war brain exploding. Which of course is exactly what it’s supposed to do. I confess to having skipped some of them in the rush to the end, but I will go back and read them in depth later, promise…
So that’s it: good, strong, plausible plot; original, interesting characters (O’Loughlin’s family life is beautifully drawn); fantastic sense of place and writing that flows with effortless ease. Five stars and thoroughly recommended.
