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In Review

21 November 2008 23:33 BST

Shatter by Michael Robotham

Published by Sphere, out February, hardback pp466.

In a nutshell…

Mind games, murder games, marriage games

What's it all about?

Clinical psychologist Joseph O'Loughlin is trying to escape his past (as was told by Robotham in two previous novels) and come to terms with his Parkinson's by teaching at a university in the south-west. When the police need someone to talk to a woman threatening to jump off Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, Jo reluctantly goes along. From there, his life and that of his family become inextricably tied to a vicious killer who murders his victims without laying a finger on them. Can Jo save the other women marked for death and, perhaps more interestingly, can his marriage survive the threat to his own family?

Who's it by?

Robotham was a very successful journalist in both the UK and his native Australia. He spent many years writing for such lauded papers as the Mail on Sunday. Then he quit to ghost write for a host of celebs, politicians, adventurers and showbusiness personalities.

In 2004 he decided he wanted some of the limelight for himself and published his first novel, The Suspect. More followed: namely The Drowning Man in 2005 and The Night Ferry in 2007. And Robotham must be pretty good at penning crime novels, as his oeuvre boasts a host of awards with the kind of silly names the genre seems so fond of – we're talking things like the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for best thriller and the Ned Kelly Award.

As an example...

"Someone shrieks with laughter. The middle-aged bride-to-be is so drunk she can barely stand. I think her name is Cathy and she's late to the alter or going around for the second time. She bumps into some guy at a table, spilling his pint, and then apologises with all the sincerity of a whore's kiss. Pity the poor bastard putting his prick in that!"

Likelihood of becoming a Hollywood blockbuster

The main thrust of the novel has been done so much that it's not likely to get much attention unless the writer's strike goes on for ages. If they did end up turning this into a movie they'd probably be all boring and focus on the killer and ignore the only interesting part. Plus the ending is too downbeat, so that would have to go. Once it was all edited, you'd basically be left with a worst and more boring version of Silence of the Lambs.

So is it any good?

There are literally millions of psychological thrillers nowadays. You need only look at the bookshelves of shops in airports and train stations to see that an army of busy little writers are diligently churning out novels to keep people occupied on the way to somewhere else. To keep ahead of the game you really need to be able to either write very well, or come up with interesting and original situations.

Unfortunately, Robotham can't really do either. The story been done before (and better by Lee Child) and the prose is never going to mean that students are reading this in classrooms of the future.

The central character is amicable but uninspiring and the killer is something of an inhuman caricature with the flimsiest of motivations.

Yet for some reason, the book is compelling and it took me to about page 234 to realise what was keeping me reading. Then it became obvious that the sub plot, which involves the relationship between Jo and his wife, was really rather interesting. Unlike the main story, the collapse of the marriage is sensitively and compelling explored. What's more, here (but not in the rest of the book) Robotham keeps the reader guessing and leaves some room for ambiguity. It's compelling stuff that outlasts the run of the mill chase the killer ending.

So the book Robotham should have written would have been an interesting story about a disintegrating relationship with a mundane murder as a subplot, rather than a mundane murder with a fascinating relationship as a subplot. Being from Australia, the chap just got everything the upside down.

6/10

James Cooper