Book review: 'Bleed For Me'

Bleed For Me
Michael Robotham
Hachette
418 pages
Rs195

Psychological thrillers have always been under the dark shadow of hardcore crime and thriller novels. Barring a few — James Patterson’s Alex Cross novels come to mind — there haven’t been many marquee names around to elevate this genre. But Michael Robotham, who ghost-wrote about a dozen autobiographies before turning to fiction, might just change it and help take the psychological thriller to the mainstream.

Bleed For Me is his sixth thriller, and the second featuring psychologist/amateur snoop Joseph O’Loughlin. His daughter’s best friend, Sienna Hegarty, is suspected of murdering her father.  O’Loughlin doesn’t believe Sienna did it, and he soon learns that she was being abused by her father.

The novel has three threads — the murder investigation, a racist crime trial, and O’Loughlin’s struggle against Parkinson’s disease and his separation and impending divorce from his wife. Though the novel could have done without at least one of these, Robotham ties it all up neatly in the last third of the book.

The murder investigation itself is a McGuffin, as the plot moves on to another sexual predator whose identity is revealed by the halfway mark. The rest of the book is about how the ailing psychologist,
a retired cop, and a lady detective chief inspector nail the pervert.

The standout aspect of the novel is its sparse, parsed down dialogues. They are simple and drive the story forward effortlessly. The prose is top class when it comes to the psychological detailing of the characters. The only minus is that the descriptive passages are clunky. But Robotham probably knows his weak area, and keeps them to the barest minimum.

But because there are three strands, and so many characters, some of them come off as stereotypical. The same is true even of the villain and it takes some of the edge away from the narrative.

Though Bleed For Me will be worthy of your time should you decide to pick it up, it definitely is not the best work of the author, who came in for high praise from Stephen King for one of his earlier novels. Even if this book doesn’t interest you, keep an eye out for Robotham if you are a fan of psychological thrillers.