Bleed for Me by Michael Robotham

I haven’t read a crime novel for years, but in the midst of studying for uni exams I decided that I needed something light to read myself to sleep at night. So off I went to the box of 50 books I wouldn’t be able to put down that was so kindly sent to me by the ABC and I picked up the first mystery book that was in the pile.

Now, like I said, I’m not a big mystery or detective fiction reader. And now that I am writing this I realize that it’s not for any particular reason. I think I just read a few crime novels that were too alike and I got bored. I have friends that can’t wait to pre-order the next to-be-published Ruth Rendell or Barbara Vine or whatever she calls herself? I have one friend who chats constantly about the latest Val McDermid and I have enjoyed watching the Blood in the Wire series on TV (a little gruesome sometimes, but good). But, I had never even heard of Michael Robotham. Nevertheless, I picked up Bleed for Me and began to read it.

Well, for two days I couldn’t put the damned thing down. Stuff the studying, I wanted to find out who done it! Hah! I hear you die hard crime novel readers smugly smirking at me right now. Yes, OK, it was great. There, are you happy now?

Robotham is good! He is clever, witty, thorough and devilishly teasing. Bleed for Me has the iconic flawed detective (who is actually a psychologist who can’t help himself), the seemingly innocent who is accused of a crime, the greedy, the suspicious, the mean and the downright despicable characters. But Robotham gets in to all of his characters psyches in way that is so intriguing you feel like you know them far better than any other character in the book does. Very clever! He sets a tone and a pace that is just fast enough to keep you off balance but not too fast to run you over. He stays in a constant style (I’m not sure how to say that in literary theory terms but I will look it up) which is difficult when you have many personalities to keep track of and a lot of seemingly random events all happening at once. He twists and turns but by the middle of the book you have fallen under Robotham’s spell and you start to just trust the process. Well into the story, as he added more characters and the plots thickened, as they say, I was ready – Bring It On! I trusted Robotham to take care of me, as the reader, by that point, and I knew he would not leave me hanging once I was sick of hanging.

If you don’t like reading about the seedier side of humanity then you don’t read crime fiction and you won’t really care that some of the characters in this book are the dregs of the worst. Even Miss Marple and Agatha Raisin had to deal with the darker side of human kind, but in the end of their stories everyone went back to being just how they were before the tragedy. Michael Robotham doesn’t insult his readers by making believe that everything is OK for the characters in this book after the crime has been solved. I fact, I believe that he builds on the residual wounds of his main characters in subsequent books. I like that.

I believed this book. I couldn’t stop reading it. I stayed up late into the night to finish it. I gave it to a fellow serious reader. I did all the things that signal to me that this book is a good book. I have faith in Michael Robotham now, and I will read another of his novels.

Rhonda