Eerie. Great place to start this series. Psychological.
Say You're Sorry
By Michael Robotham
Two girls, Piper and Tash, go missing on the last weekend of the holidays. Despite immense and prolific dedication by both the media and the police, the girls’ case runs cold, and it’s forgotten for three years. However, the memories of everyone who ever knew the girls are suddenly inspected and scrutinised after a husband and wife are brutally murdered in Tash’s old home. With clinical psychologist and ex-cop team Joe O’Loughlin and Vincent Ruiz convinced that the missing girls could still be alive, the police have no choice but to re-open the old case.
This novel is a fantastic little gem nestled in the middle of the Joe O’Loughlin series. Robotham has 9 books in the series, and he’s done a brilliant job of crafting them in a way that lets the reader enjoy them in almost any order. BUT don’t read the final two yet! There are a bunch of spoilers in the final titles as Robotham closes old cases and concludes the character threads that run through the series. However, I read Watching You (number 7) and Say You’re Sorry (number 6) before the others, and these two (with Lost, number 2) are still my favourites. I think Say You’re Sorry is a great title to start your obsession with Robotham because it showcases the author’s talents in unsettling the reader with point of view.
Say You’re Sorry bounces between the points of view of kidnap victims, the kidnapper, and the people searching for the missing girls. Robotham’s novels are the definition of psychological crime fiction as they literally host a clinical psychologist as the protagonist, who explains the psychology of the deviants in the narrative. In Say You’re Sorry, you can read about the distress of the victim, the reasoning of the kidnapper, and the frustration and rage of the police from one chapter to another. I’ll do a full series recommendation later (because I STRONGLY recommend the whole series), but why not start with Say You’re Sorry?
