SHATTER by Michael Robotham

Finished Mo 7/12/11

Michael Robotham is the author of "THE WRECKAGE", and in that riveting thriller Robotham focused on financial mismanagement and corporate corruption manifested by the war in Iraq. SHATTER also deals with a kind of collateral damage from that war. Gideon Tyler is a trained military interrogator who is supremely adept at breaking captives in The War On Terror through the forbidden application of torture. His wife and child have left him, and he kidnaps friends of his wife to try to find them. Tyler's evil psychological manipulations create some of the most sinister dramatic situations that I have ever read. Merely by the use of inference to terrifying suggestions, he is able to convince two women to commit suicide, and confuse and confound the authorities. Joe O'Loughlin is a retired criminal psychologist raising two young daughters, and suspects his wife of infidelity. O'Loughlin suffers from the onset of Parkinson's disease, and portions of the novel deal with how an individual learns to cope with this affliction. Soon Joe becomes a key player in the investigation, and gets swept up in Gideon Tyler's psychotic web of deception and duplicity.

The novel begins with an an inventive and alarming scene in which O'Loughlin watches a naked woman jump from a bridge, and the police have no idea who she is or why she jumped, and, most important, who was she talking to on her cell phone at the moment of her plunge.

The novel is set near the town of Bath, England.

Another excellent and adventuresome read, and Robotham's journalistic style really adds a sense of hyper-reality to the work.