book reviews:
The Suspect & The Drowning Man
by Michael Robotham
The Suspect opens with a curiously beautiful and offbeat paragraph:
From the pitched slate roof of the Royal Marsden Hospital, if you look between the chimney pots and TV aerials, you see more chimney pots and TV aerials. It's like that scene from Mary Poppins where all the chimney sweeps dance across the rooftops twirling their brooms.
This did a lot to draw me into a narrative that, in the early going, is amply rewarding, introducing clinical psychologist Joseph O'Louglin a smart, decent hero whose ordered and happy life begins unravelling when a young woman's body is discovered with multiple self-inflicted stab wounds. Natuarally she turns out to be a former colleague of Joseph's with more complications, connections and twists to follow and the novel speeds off carried by a complex, intricate, and mostly fascinating plot.
Drowning Man, first line...
I remember someone once telling me that you know it's cold when you see a lawyer with his hands in his own pockets. It's colder than that now. My mouth is numb and every breath like slivers of ice in my lungs.
Joesph makes a great and in some ways unique character and Robotham plays his humanity and flaws well and I really liked him. On the other hand, Joesph's double, Detective Inspector Vincent Ruiz who persues Joseph as a suspect, is not so well drawn. He is a character we've seen many times before - the tough cop
who lives on the edge and makes his own rules.
There is nothing new here and it is too bad that Robotham could not have had the imagination to produce a more memorable or interesting character.
My main problem with The Suspect, is that is does not live up to the promise of the early chapters and the story slowly becomes flat, diffuse and somewhat dull. The final third of the novel is especially tedious and I was tempted to put it down on a few occasions. Robotham keeps the twists and turns coming but they become less and less interesting. The novel feels (and is!) 100 pages too long and should have been edited (a problem I find increasingly these days). There is a final twist that is thrown in right at the end that makes sense but is handled in such an offhand manner that it feels like an afterthought and really left me unsatisfied.
I wish I could report a more positive experience - particularly since I ran out and bought his next two novels on the strength of the first half of The Suspect. Drowning Man has the same weakness as the first, the same overwritten, amorphous plot only this time, Robotham has made the detective from the first book, DI Ruiz, the protagonist, which, though initially seems an interesting idea, proves to be a huge mistake. Ruiz, painted by Robotham, is a tedious cliche, the kind of rule-breaking, living on the edge, malcontented cop that we have seen time and again (and sometimes excellently as evidenced by Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch series). The problem here, aside from the well trodden territory, is that Robotham can't invest the character with anything new or interesting and Ruiz exists simply as a dull, worn-out trope hardly worth the effort of getting to know; however, it is clear Robotham thinks he is an interesting character as he invests a lot of energy in writing him, which is too bad as he is not really worth the effort.
The story is fairly interesting, but, again, old ground in that we have a Ruiz shot and left for dead in the Thames and having no memory of how he got there. The narrarative follows the detective detecting what happened, searching the black hole of his memory for clues, as it were. This is a seductive idea, as Peter Abrahams has shown in the largely excellent Oblivion, but not in Robotham's hands where once again the narrative stretches beyond the point of tedium and I found my eyes straying to the bottom of the page more frequently, hoping I was close to the end. Rogotham throws in the final chapter twist, as he did in the first novel and this one is perhaps even more annoying that the first.
One thing I will say for Robotham, he is a very talented wordsmith and some of his descriptions and observations are quite beautifully contructed, but in the end they are just ornamentation on an uninteresting whole.
other views:
news:
My review of Street Kings
is up; as is a review of the decidedly non-criminal but quite good The Ruins.
crime links:
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Upcoming Reviews
Local author Kay Stewart and Chris Bullock's A Deadly Little List. When I get around to it, I may write an essay on the
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