Lying Beside You by Michael Robotham

Lying Beside You by Michael Robotham
Buy Lying Beside You by Michael Robotham at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Thrillers
Reviewer: Sue Magee
Summary: Cyrus Haven, forensic psychologist, has a lot going on at the moment. His brother, Elias, who murdered his parents and twin sisters, is going to be released from Rampton. Then Cyrus is called to a crime scene in Nottingham. A man has been murdered and his daughter is misssing. Highly recommended.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 400	Date: June 2022
Publisher: Sphere
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 978-0751581577
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Elias Haven murdered his parents and his twin sisters two days after his nineteenth birthday. Voices told him to do it. Only two people survived the carnage - Elias, who was sent to Rampton, and his thirteen-year-old brother, Cyrus, who hid in a shed until the police found him. Twenty years later, Cyrus is a forensic psychologist and he's been told that his brother is being released. Can Cyrus forgive the sinner whilst having to live on a daily basis with the results of the crime? Can he bear to have Elias living in the same house? How will his lodger, twenty-one-year-old Evie Cormac, cope?

Cyrus still has his job to cope with and he's called to a crime scene in Nottingham. A man is dead and his daughter, Maya, is missing. Before long another woman is abducted and the only witness is Evie who has a troubled background and a gift for knowing when people are lying to her. As she admits herself, that's just about all the time. People do it - it's just that she has a hard time letting things go.

Both missing women have dark secrets, and Cyrus will have to unravel their pasts if he's to understand the case. Both he and Evie know what it's like to have secrets to hide: as a child, Cyrus was Befriended. Bullied. Cosseted. Counselled. He was a hard child to love. Perhaps that's what he recognised in Evie. Detective Superintendent Lenny Parvel recognises the value he brings to her cases but the officer in charge of this case, DCI Gary Hoyle, isn't worried about voicing his reservations. He's also convinced that he's identified the killer: it's the man who sexually assaulted one of the abducted women six years ago and who has just been released from prison.

I loved this book. I was pulled in before I got to the bottom of the first page and when I got to the last I was trying to turn it over to see if there was anything more to read. I often get annoyed when characters' backstories are given in detail but that didn't happen in Lying Beside You. I wanted to know more about Cyrus and Evie. They're so well-observed that they were with me even when I wasn't reading and I found I was developing plans for their futures. They had become real with a life outside the novel.

The plot is superb. The pacing is perfect as layer upon layer of intrigue is added and the story twists every which way. At times the tension is almost unbearable and I finished the book in just two sittings. There was no way that I was prepared to go any longer without knowing the name of the killer. Did I guess whodunnit? No. Was I satisfied by how it worked out? Absolutely.

I'd like to thank the publishers for letting Bookbag have a review copy. This is actually the third book in Robotham's Cyrus Haven series. I wasn't aware of this before I started reading and - as you can see - it didn't affect my enjoyment of the book. I will definitely be going back to get the first two books in the series.

For more from Michael Robotham, try Bleed For Me.

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