Robotham, Michael: Lost

Doubleday © 2006, 341 pages [amazon]

When Michael Robotham's Lost opens, Detective Inspector Vincent Ruiz is being pulled nearly dead from the Thames, missing a finger and bleeding out from a gunshot to his leg. He has no memory of how he came to be there, and must, over the following weeks, reconstruct his likely movements in the days before he was shot. At the same time, Ruiz is haunted by his own version of a locked-room mystery, the disappearance three years earlier of seven-year-old Mickey Carlyle from her apartment building. The two incidents--Mickey's disappearance and Ruiz's shooting--may be related. To try to wrestle memories from his subconscious the Detective gets help from psychologist Joe O'Loughlin, who was the principal character in Robotham's first book, Suspect.  Ruiz's quest for answers will lead him back into the minutiae of the Carlyle case, and back into the bowels of London's underground.

At the same time, Ruiz is haunted by his own version of a locked-room mystery, the disappearance three years earlier of seven-year-old Mickey Carlyle from her apartment building.Robotham offers a very clever mystery in Lost that readers are unlikely to unravel before the book's denouement. But while Robotham's Suspect was a page-turner, his sophomore effort tends to drag. Lost is still a decent read, but a tighter, shorter book would have been more successful.

Tags: book reviews, books, Michael Robotham