I just finished reading "Watching You" by Michael Robotham. It is a murder mystery, and a masterful suspense story. It is concerned with split personalities. Marnie Logan feels like she is being watched. Her husband, Daniel, has vanished leaving her to pay his gambling debts.
She needs proof of his death to collect his life insurance. Her clinical psychologist, Joe O'Loughlin tries to help. The police are called in, but cannot help. There are many twists and turns....so much so that this book becomes a page-turner. This novel is very difficult to put down. It will remind you of the best of Stephen King. -Bob K.

Riveting, thrilling and a helluva ride! Once again, this latest novel in the Joseph O'Loughlin series, delivers! Big time! Thank you, Mr Robotham! Now the question is, how long until the next one?

Holy crap, where to begin? This is a riveting, deeply psychological thriller that will have you closing the drapes & checking the basement.
Marnie Logan isn't having a bad day, she's having a bad year. Ever since her husband Daniel did a runner thirteen months ago, she's been scraping to put food on the table for herself & her kids, teenager Zoe & 4 year old Elijah. The icing on the cake is his 30,000 pound gambling debt to Patrick Hennessy, a "hard" man who expects her to pay it one way or another. Fearing for her kids, Marnie begins working for Patrick as an escort.
On her third outing, she ends up talking her "date" out of committing suicide. It's a small victory that results in a beating at the hands of Quinn, her driver. She quits but you don't walk away from a man like Patrick. And he's not her only problem. Her landlords want 2 months back rent, Elijah needs special medical treatment & then there's creepy neighbour Trevor who watches her every move.
Marnie had emotional issues in the past stemming from seeing her mother die in childbirth, resulting in aggressive behaviour as a teen & anxiety attacks that led to blackouts. Due to her stressful situation, they're back & she's seeing Dr. Joe O'Loughlin every week. He knows about it all...her job, Patrick & the fight to get Daniel declared dead so she can access his insurance policy to pay off the debt & start over. But things are about to get a whole lot worse.
The day after the beating, Quinn's body is fished out of the Thames. That brings DI Warren Gennia into her life, a persistent cop who's already suspicious about her husband's disappearance.
Meanwhile, Joe jas his own issues. His office is ransacked & a file is missing. He calls old friend Vincent Ruiz, a retired Met detective. If Ruiz can find out what happened to Daniel, maybe Marnie can get some closure (and cash). But neither is prepared for what comes crawling out as Ruiz starts digging.
Turns out Daniel was contacting people from Marnie's past to make a memory book for her birthday. When it's found, Ruiz uses the book to talk to the same people in an effort to track Daniel but ends up learning more about Marnie & discovers she has been less than forthcoming.
On the home front, Marnie continues to disintegrate as more bodies pop up, all with ties to her. Elijah copes by spending time in a wardrobe with his special friend, Malcolm & Zoe strikes up a friendship with Ruben, an older man she met at the library.
This is a taut, intricately plotted thriller full of red herrings & misdirection. There are little twists everywhere that can give you whiplash as you swing from one character to another as the killer. In alternating chapters, we are privy to the private thoughts & history of someone who is truly a psychopath & they tell the reader what they've done over the years to protect Marnie. it's obvious they've been shadowing her since childhood & it's absolutely creepy, not to mention fatal to some who've hurt her.
There are several credible candidates & the author slowly doles out the clues, revealing Marnie's past as he reels us in. It's a compulsive read that makes you doubt everyone at one time or another. The characters are well written & you care about what happens to them....well, maybe not Patrick & Quinn. Joe is smart, patient & compassionate & even he starts to doubt himself, wondering if he's being played. Ruiz is his perfect foil. They have a long history Ruiz' dry, slightly sarcastic wit provides moments of comic relief as the tension ramps up.
The truth of the whole mess is revealed to the reader before Joe & Ruiz so the final chapters become a game of cat & mouse as we watch them struggle to put the pieces together at the same time that Marnie & the kids are in danger. It's not 'til the end that we find out who she really needed to be protected from.
This is a clever, complex story that will screw with your head & pulse rate. It's a rarity & a pleasure to read a book where all the answers aren't telegraphed from the beginning but perhaps not unexpected from this author who excels in the genre.

Wow, obsession is the best way to describe this book. The complexities of individuals never cease to amaze me, the sins of the parents are definitely passed to their children. What a difference that can make further down the line.
What will I do when the J O series is over. I have read them all prior to this one, but this one stands out by far. Not least because of the way the story is woven around a woman trying to survive so many tragedies in her life, whilst living in a nightmare reality.

No other writer can make me sit up and listen the way M R does. The depth of his stories are so engaging, I gobble them down like I haven’t eaten in ages. I can’t get through them quick enough,

Whilst I can’t wait to hear what happens next, I also don’t want them to end , like savouring my favourite

In this seventh novel in Michael Robotham’s Luiz/O’Loughlin series the sense of unease and anticipation builds from the opening lines. Marnie Logan, young, married, with two children, is struggling to survive since her husband Daniel simply vanished a couple of years earlier and it quickly becomes obvious that there's a lurking presence in her life that has been there for a long time:

Marnie Logan often feels like she's being watched. Nothing she can quite put her finger on – a whisper of breath on the back of her neck, or a shadow in the corner of her eye – and now her life is frozen.

It becomes increasingly hard to tell if the lurking presence is a portent of worse to come, something to do with her missing husband, or something more internal. Marnie’s struggling to cope with the legal and financial mess that Daniel’s disappearance has left her in, the personal consequences of his debts and the illness of her young son. Forced into prostitution by the gangster her husband owed a lot of money to, she is depressed, confused and grieving when she turns to her neighbour O'Loughlin for help.

Sympathy, however, quickly turns to confusion and even mistrust as the discovery of an incomplete journal being prepared by her missing husband as a birthday present reveals a different side to Marnie Logan. It seems that this broken and grief-stricken woman was in the past feared, disliked, cursed and avoided: a woman known for sending the message ‘Payback is a bitch!’ to the people that she's got even with.

‘It wasn't my weed. Someone put if there. A few weeks later I got a card through the post. Four words.“Payback is a bitch!”’ … Eugene glances past Joe.

‘A month or so later, Debbie got a card through the mail. Same message: “Payback is a bitch!”’

... ‘It arrived about a month after I started my sentence. No name, no return address, postmarked from London. It said “Payback is a bitch!”’ Mosley rubs at his bloodshot eyes.

Logan is confused, but O'Loughlin is worried and he turns to Vincent Ruiz for his help. Not before time, as the violent and nasty stand-over man who delivers Marnie to prostitution appointments is found dead and she is a suspect. As Ruiz starts to dig deeper, there are other sinister revealtions and things start to look very damning for the woman who started out a victim.

This author has got a way of ramping up the suspense very quickly and keeping you on the edge of your seat until the final page. His voices are authentic, the twists and turns elegantly presented, and his ongoing cast of characters engaging and involving. Some readers may connect more with O'Loughlin than Ruiz, or vice versa, and for both camps, WATCHING YOU is equally interesting. There's a particularly nice touch in the way O'Loughlin struggles with his relationship with his teenage daughter, in particular, to say nothing of his ex-wife; yet multi-divorced Ruiz is the voice of reason when it comes to women, and a strong support figure for the teenaged Charlie in particular.

As the series has progressed, so has the relationship between O'Loughlin and Ruiz. There's a real sense of shared history and friendship now between the two of them, and something beautifully pared down and supportive about their interactions. The relationship allows for glimpses of humour, or trust and normality in a storyline that's anything but humorous, trusting or normal.

It seems the idea for the novel came from a real-life scenario, which is particularly interesting as the way the story plays out in WATCHING YOU is very realistic and even more disquieting as a result. But there are other messages woven delicately into the threads of this narrative. Obsession is a powerful emotion and somebody in its grip can be powerless to break away. And the consequences of obsession can be devastating for anybody unlucky enough to get caught in the vortex, to say nothing of those directly impacted.

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/review-watching-you-michael-robotham

Really enjoyed this novel, a bit dark and a bit of twist, wish there was a little more Joe, but another decent story by Robotham.

As a big time fan of Michael Robotham's work, I was very excited to start reading his latest book "Watching you". This might actually the best book he's ever written, a crime/thriller as it should be. I read it in one stretch, only interrupted by unavoidable working and sleeping hours, but apart from that, I pretty much just had to keep reading it. As always, the characters are very well developed and the storyline is just overwhelming and original. "Nothing is as it seems' might be the perfect way to describe this book and the last paragraph just made me want to start over the entire book, looking for clues I might have missed, leaving me with this "Oh no…. don't say it's true" kind of feeling. Wonderful book. Want more Robotham!

I enjoy Robotham, but I must admit this was not my favorite of the O'Loughlin series. The constant need to prove that Joe is a psychologist and therefore sees things differently got a little grating here. Also, the ending felt so cobbled together. That being said, it was still an engaging story. So you sir squeak by with a 3 star review, if only for fan's rights.

When I started this book I thought it was going to be predictable and I thought I had the plot all worked out. I couldn't have been more wrong. Robotham shows again why he is one of my favorite psychological crime writers and is at the top of his game.