Shatter (Michael Robotham, Sphere, $32.99 pb, ISBN 9781847441782, April) ****

A woman jumps to her death from a bridge, an obvious suicide. The clinical psychologist called in to talk her down thinks she was coerced. The police ignore his theory, forcing him to chase it up himself. From this fairly standard opening, Michael Robotham constructs a psychological thriller of surprising depth and at times almost unbearable tension. This reviewer was forced to cover the lower portion of some pages with a hand, to keep from jumping ahead. Shatter is apparently Robotham’s third novel to feature clinical psychologist Joe O’Loughlin, but works as a stand-alone thriller thanks to the nifty device of moving Joe and family to the countryside to escape the memories of an earlier case. Robotham brings a depth and reality to the family and draws the reader into the drama of a failing marriage, so that when the mayhem begins, it’s genuinely shocking and affecting. Robotham has a political axe to grind, and occasionally the dialogue goes a little over the top, but these are minor quibbles. It’s tense, fast-paced and, for the most part, an intelligent, thoughtprovoking read. What more could you want from a psychological thriller?

Beau Taylor is a bookseller at Pulp Fiction Booksellers

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

Tags: michael robotham