In 2015, I read Michael Robotham’s The Night Ferry, then in 2016 I was KNOCKED OUT by Close Your Eyes! 2017’s The Secrets She Keeps was not quite as terrific (for me) as the other two, so maybe that is how I missed 2019’s Good Girl, Bad Girl, the first in a series featuring Cyrus Haven. Cyrus is a psychologist who turns out to be a former student of Joe O’Loughlin, the protagonist of Robotham’s primary series. The two men (Cyrus and Joe) have quite a bit in common. Besides being psychologists, each is a kind of wounded soul: Joe has Parkinson’s and a crappy marriage, and Cyrus is living with the knowledge that his wacko brother killed the entire rest of the family. OK, crappy and wacko are not the kindest terms for these two, but here we are!
Good Girl, Bad Girl, book #1 in the series, told the story of Cyrus meeting Evie Cormac when he was called in to help after she was found trapped in a torture house. (PTSD, anyone?) Evie has the uncanny ability to tell when someone is lying, and she helped Cyrus solve a tricky case in that first book. In When She Was Good, #2 in the series, Evie and Cyrus reconnected and, as Cyrus worked to uncover the secrets of Evie’s past, he found that he was exposing her to serious danger. Quite a dilemma!
Robotham (and Cyrus and Evie) are back, with Lying Beside You. It’s another page-turner (a term I hate, but which gets the message across) for sure. Since the last book, Cyrus has begun sharing his house with Evie, who is a truly damaged teenager. She also has the gift of being able to tell whether someone is lying or not. She has gone back to school and, at Cyrus’s urging, has taken a job. She’s doing pretty well, considering her issues with rules and authority…
Then, as if Cyrus’s life wasn’t complicated enough, his brother Elias is about to be released from a psychiatric prison after nearly two decades. At the age of nineteen, he massacred the entire rest of their family (parents and twin sisters). Cyrus is apparently expected to forgive Elias and welcome him into his home. Easy, right?
When a man is murdered and his daughter disappears, Cyrus is called in to help the police with the baffling case. The woman was last seen at the bar where Evie has been working, and the police theory is that she was drugged and abducted. Then, another woman is taken, and this time Evie saw the man behind the wheel of the getaway car. It quickly becomes a twisty, complex case, and we get lots to unravel, including police corruption, murder, abduction, family dynamics, and teenage angst. Robotham is terrific at creating characters with whom the reader can become emotionally invested, and in presenting convoluted plotlines in a way that is fun without being overwhelming. I love this author! This is some great escape-from-pandemic reading, and can be read as a standalone if you haven’t discovered the first two in the Cyrus-Evie series. Five stars.