"You know its going to be a bad day when you are having a prostate examination and you feel both of your doctor's hands on your shoulders!"
Reader, exciting news! Did you know that Agent Hawthorne has hired a psychologist to profile me? Of course you don't. Unless you're Agent Hawthorne, or the psychologist, or the person who approves Hawthorne's expenses. If you are any of those people, then please do drop me a line - I'd love to know what you're reading these days.The psychologist (hello, Amy!) is a lovely woman, and very smart, and I have no doubt that she'll have me all figured out in a tick. As an homage to her hard work, I decided to read a book about a psychologist who winds up working with the police. Don't worry, though, Amy - I'm sure that your shared profession is where your resemblance to the protagonist ends, otherwise Hawthorne would never have hired you.
Oh, and nothing personal, Amy - but don't expect to catch me. That's how most of these books end, but you and I are not fictional characters, and we will probably never meet. Hope that's okay.
The Suspect by the capricious Michael Robotham...
...verged on being a good book, but then, it wasn't.
The main character, Joseph O'Loughlin, is a psychologist who winds up being asked to assist in a murder investigation. Of course, he winds up getting pulled in way over his head, his life is at risk, yadda yadda, you know the drill with these ones. The thing/other thing in this particular story: O'Loughlin has recently been diagnosed with Parkinson's, and is struggling to cope with his diagnosis. This sounded to me like it would end up being a satisfactory read - overall, bog-standard, but with perhaps some added color; I do love a nuanced main character, as you well know. I had moderately high hopes.
Alas.
Joseph O'Loughlin is a stock character. He is a psychologist who is helping to investigate a crime - we all know how that plays out. The reader is treated to a straightforward 'should I try to help the person I suspect or should I just turn them in,' 'Oh dear, this is bigger than I thought,' 'O Woe Betide the Hubris of the Psychologist' narrative. This is nothing new, reader. It's boring, and I'm not going to talk about it any more. Instead, I'm going to talk about the women of The Suspect, because they are the thing that made this go from an average book to a below-average book.
I am not one to bandy about "this book hates women." Many books neglect the development of their female characters; some of them go so far as to affront the very nature of women in literature. An underdeveloped female character will not ruin a book for me - although I cannot immediately think of a book I've enjoyed in which the female characters were left to flounder in shallow narrative waters. Here is what will ruin a book for me, reader: women as decoration, obstacle, and spectacle.
All of these assessments will go from top to toes, so I'm putting them in the spoilers. If you're stopping here because you don't want the book spoiled, I'll leave you with this: if you're looking for a good crime novel, read something else.
Now, for Spoilers.
Here are the female characters: Sainted Wife, Broken Prostitute, Dead Nurse, Abusive Promiscuous Mother. I'm not going to include analyses of Vague Former Colleague, Organized Secretary, or Age-Ambiguous Daughter, because they are so underdeveloped that there is nothing for me to grab hold of - I have literally included everything about them in their titles.
Sainted Wife: O'Loughlin's wife is described as beautiful, intelligent, charitable, vivacious, and generally lovely. The narrator goes out of his way to repeatedly draw our attention to how essentially perfect she is. Her biggest flaw: not giving her husband enough sex, because she wants a baby, and is closely tracking her cycle in an attempt to maximize the efficacy of his sperm. When shit goes pear-shaped and O'Loughlin is suspected of murder, she finds out that he had sex with Broken Prostitute, and responds with appropriate outrage. Later, when he is vindicated of the murder charge, she turns out to be pregnant and decides to forgive and reconcile with O'Loughlin. The fact that he had sex with Broken Prostitute, sans condom, and then had sex with Sainted Wife, also sans condom, is brought up during the initial confrontation and then is never mentioned again. The high stakes ("Do you know how long I have to wait before I can get tested for AIDS? Three months.") evaporate, because no reason. She is domestic, child-focused, and yielding.
Dead Nurse: The kickoff to the murder investigation is the discovery of a body: the body of a nurse, who has been killed by oodles of torturous stab wounds. We discover, through the course of the book, that O'Loughlin knew her - he had treated her for self-harm. His treatment of her included sending her home with fresh scalpel blades to ensure that she would use clean ones (remember, Amy, I think you're much smarter than him). We also discover that she had attempted to seduce him, and, when rebuffed, she had fabricated a rape accusation against him. She is unstable, manipulative, and (of course) hot for the main character.
Abusive Promiscuous Mother: This is the biggest spoiler in this review, so feel free to skip it if you're worried about that. This character is the mother of the murderer(s). At the end of the book, here's what we've learned about her. (a) She falsely accused her husband of sexually abusing her son, because she wanted a divorce and for some unexplained reason did not just divorce him. (b) She had sex with... everyone. Everyone in the world. (c) She took her son and stepson to watch her participate in orgies ("She was laid out on the table like a smorgasbord. Naked. There were dozens of hands on her. Anyone could do anything they wanted. She had enough for all of them. Pain. Pleasure. It was all the same to her"). And, last but certainly not least - (d) She forced her son and stepson to participate in the orgies themselves. She tries to have sex with O'Loughlin on her deathbed; then, cancer kills her, and the reader is meant to understand that death is the least she deserves. She is the worst kind of Oedipal nightmare; a perversion of everything a mother and a woman should be.
Broken Prostitute: This character is the one that most clearly highlighted this book's hatred for women. She only contributes to the plot in that O'Loughlin has sex with her. The description of this, by the way, gives her about as much agency as a slick palm, and in no way acknowledges the power dynamic between a psychologist and the woman who he treated when she was a fifteen-year-old-prostitute.
While this is her only participation in the plot of the book - 'person who main character sleeps with because he's sad about his Parkinson's' - she gets a high wordcount. Why do you suppose she gets space on the page, reader? You should be able to guess this by now.
Yes, indeed, it's the thing you were hoping it wouldn't be. The space afforded to this woman in The Suspect is devoted to describing her rapes. Lots of them. In plenty of detail - detail which, really, O'Loughlin (the first-person narrator) couldn't know. But why not stretch POV for the sake of delving into a narrative of multiple gang-rapes? And then, why not have her die horribly too (suffocation, in case you were wondering). After all, she exists within the narrative solely to tempt, to suffer, and (ultimately) to die.
So, that's the book. Women who are either perfect or terrible; women who want O'Loughlin's dick and/or semen; women who either bear children or die horribly. At the end of the book, the person who O'Loughlin thinks did it, did it. O'Loughlin is a hero, and his wife loves him, and they're going to have a baby together, and nevermind any of the rest of it. As we're explicitly told: he ends the book lucky.
The end, reader.
Sainted Wife: O'Loughlin's wife is described as beautiful, intelligent, charitable, vivacious, and generally lovely. The narrator goes out of his way to repeatedly draw our attention to how essentially perfect she is. Her biggest flaw: not giving her husband enough sex, because she wants a baby, and is closely tracking her cycle in an attempt to maximize the efficacy of his sperm. When shit goes pear-shaped and O'Loughlin is suspected of murder, she finds out that he had sex with Broken Prostitute, and responds with appropriate outrage. Later, when he is vindicated of the murder charge, she turns out to be pregnant and decides to forgive and reconcile with O'Loughlin. The fact that he had sex with Broken Prostitute, sans condom, and then had sex with Sainted Wife, also sans condom, is brought up during the initial confrontation and then is never mentioned again. The high stakes ("Do you know how long I have to wait before I can get tested for AIDS? Three months.") evaporate, because no reason. She is domestic, child-focused, and yielding.
Dead Nurse: The kickoff to the murder investigation is the discovery of a body: the body of a nurse, who has been killed by oodles of torturous stab wounds. We discover, through the course of the book, that O'Loughlin knew her - he had treated her for self-harm. His treatment of her included sending her home with fresh scalpel blades to ensure that she would use clean ones (remember, Amy, I think you're much smarter than him). We also discover that she had attempted to seduce him, and, when rebuffed, she had fabricated a rape accusation against him. She is unstable, manipulative, and (of course) hot for the main character.
Abusive Promiscuous Mother: This is the biggest spoiler in this review, so feel free to skip it if you're worried about that. This character is the mother of the murderer(s). At the end of the book, here's what we've learned about her. (a) She falsely accused her husband of sexually abusing her son, because she wanted a divorce and for some unexplained reason did not just divorce him. (b) She had sex with... everyone. Everyone in the world. (c) She took her son and stepson to watch her participate in orgies ("She was laid out on the table like a smorgasbord. Naked. There were dozens of hands on her. Anyone could do anything they wanted. She had enough for all of them. Pain. Pleasure. It was all the same to her"). And, last but certainly not least - (d) She forced her son and stepson to participate in the orgies themselves. She tries to have sex with O'Loughlin on her deathbed; then, cancer kills her, and the reader is meant to understand that death is the least she deserves. She is the worst kind of Oedipal nightmare; a perversion of everything a mother and a woman should be.
Broken Prostitute: This character is the one that most clearly highlighted this book's hatred for women. She only contributes to the plot in that O'Loughlin has sex with her. The description of this, by the way, gives her about as much agency as a slick palm, and in no way acknowledges the power dynamic between a psychologist and the woman who he treated when she was a fifteen-year-old-prostitute.
While this is her only participation in the plot of the book - 'person who main character sleeps with because he's sad about his Parkinson's' - she gets a high wordcount. Why do you suppose she gets space on the page, reader? You should be able to guess this by now.
Yes, indeed, it's the thing you were hoping it wouldn't be. The space afforded to this woman in The Suspect is devoted to describing her rapes. Lots of them. In plenty of detail - detail which, really, O'Loughlin (the first-person narrator) couldn't know. But why not stretch POV for the sake of delving into a narrative of multiple gang-rapes? And then, why not have her die horribly too (suffocation, in case you were wondering). After all, she exists within the narrative solely to tempt, to suffer, and (ultimately) to die.
So, that's the book. Women who are either perfect or terrible; women who want O'Loughlin's dick and/or semen; women who either bear children or die horribly. At the end of the book, the person who O'Loughlin thinks did it, did it. O'Loughlin is a hero, and his wife loves him, and they're going to have a baby together, and nevermind any of the rest of it. As we're explicitly told: he ends the book lucky.
The end, reader.
Rating: Lamentable.
Possible ratings: Magnificent, Divine, Satisfactory, Tiresome, Lamentable, Execrable. This is a blog about words, what rating system did you expect?
Thank you, I was wondering what was wrong with me as this book got so many high reviews.
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