ALL EYES ON ME
Michael Robotham is intrigued by the boundaries between voyeurism and stalking, writes Bron Sibree
Watching You ★★★★ ★ Michael Robotham (Little, Brown, R245)
MICHAEL Robotham’s books are so unusually gripping that his fans are known to lay in supplies before starting to read. His new and ninth novel, Watching You, is as compelling and unconventional as they come, partly because of his ability to create credible characters.
Set mainly in London, it also sees the return of one of his most popular creations, the brilliant clinical psychologist Joe O’Loughlin, who suffers from early onset Parkinson’s disease and to whom Robotham happily admits “doing terrible things” in the interests of character development. In Watching You, O’Loughlin, together with Vincent Ruiz, another of Robotham’s flawed but engaging regulars, becomes embroiled in one of the most mystifying cases of his career, when a young London mother seeks help after her husband goes missing.
For Robotham, this deeply chilling, intricately plotted novel grew out of the facts of a stalking case he covered as an investigative journalist 23 years ago — facts so alarming they’ve haunted him since.
“To reveal them would be to spoil the plot’s twist,” he says, “but it was about a Sydney man who’d become obsessed with a woman who lived across the road from him. I’ve always been interested in the boundary between voyeurism and stalking and, in the case of Watching You, the fact that you can be stalked not just by an individual but by your own memories.”
An engaging conversationalist, Robotham is endlessly curious about the world. He can tell you how and why, for instance, banks laundered over $353-billion worth of drug cartel money during the global financial crisis; facts which seeded his much acclaimed 2011 novel, The Wreckage, or share with you his insights on the psychology of psychopaths, which are seamed into Say You’re Sorry — hailed by Stephen King as one of the best books of 2012.
“I never intended to write Joe beyond that first book, The Suspect,” says Robotham. “If I’d known then what I know now there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have given him Parkinson’s. But the reason was due to my fascination with the human mind. As P.D James has always said, we’re all capable of murder. But everything we do and say, whether it be the good, the bad, the ugly, it all comes back to that few pounds of grey matter between our ears. And that’s what fascinates me. That to me is the great unknown.” —