Shatter
Michael Robotham
Doubleday, 2008
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 978-0-385-51791-1
448 pages; $24.95

Psychological mysteries fascinate me. I’ve recently become a fan of the television show “Criminal Minds,” about the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI, and have been ruing that I didn’t join the FBI when I got out of law school. I’m fascinated by what twists a mind to make it evil. Why do humans kill other humans to obtain what they could get by other, nonviolent, means? Is it fear, a background of abuse, or are some people simply born with a desire to kill? Why are there serial killers?

Michael Robotham’s protagonist is a clinical psychologist named Joseph O’Loughlin who finds himself wrapped up in these questions. O’Loughlin suffers from Parkinson’s disease, and has recently given up his practice and become a part-time lecturer at a university in the West Country of England. Immediately following his inaugural lecture, he is summoned by the police to talk a woman off a bridge – a woman who is naked except for her red high-heeled shoes, and who is holding a cellphone to her ear as if her life depends upon it. O’Loughlin isn’t any help at all, and the woman plummets to her death.

That ought to have been the end of it aside from feelings of regret and, perhaps, guilt, but O’Loughlin is soon convinced by the dead woman’s 16-year-old daughter that it wasn’t suicide, despite all the evidence to the contrary. His suspicions are confirmed, and he is able to get the police convinced, too, when another woman dies, naked but for good shoes, also apparently while on a cell phone – and she, too, has a child. O’Loughlin remains involved, despite his wife’s pleas that he leave things to the police. He talks to witnesses, investigates relevant sites, and generally makes something of a pest of himself – but he also makes progress.

The progress is not without its price, however, and the price to his family is especially high. Robotham skillfully draws his characters so that it is their personalities that drive the plot as much or more than the crimes that O’Loughlin seeks to prevent. Indeed, the book seems to be as much about O’Loughlin’s marriage as it is about the crimes recounted, which adds much to its appeal.

Shatter is at least 50 pages longer than it needs to be, as is the case with so many mysteries these days; it’s as if authors are afraid we won’t buy their books if they aren’t at least 400 pages long. Here, Robotham slows things down and adds incidents, description and interior monologue that all hurt the pacing and mitigate the tension he has created. But this is really a quibble, because the characters are interesting enough to make the reader want to spend time with them.

Ultimately, Shatter is good enough that I intend to seek out Robotham’s other books, especially Suspect, which introduced Joseph O’Loughlin. And I really hope that Robotham will write another book featuring this character, because I want to know what happens to him next.