A critical incident team has been pulled together, including senior members of staff, police and a psychologist-me. The National Health Service has a whole raft of guidelines for dealing with hostage situations and threatened suicides. I want to join that debate, but first I need an invitation. He’s concentrating on his own internal dialogue, debating whether he should live or die. I know he can hear me, but my voice is just background noise. He plays the violin and speaks five languages-none of which he’ll speak to me.įor the last hour I’ve been asking him questions and telling him stories.

According to his oncologist, Malcolm has an exceptional IQ. Even if I stretch out and lean along the gutter, I will still be six feet short of catching him.

Already my fingers are numb and I can barely feel my toes through my shoes and socks. The temperature is 3☌, but the wind chill has chased it below zero. He is wearing pajamas and a woolen hat to cover his baldness. Tall and thin, with dark eyes that tremble when he looks at me, he has skin as white as polished paper. His name is Malcolm and he’s seventeen today. “This is some view,” I say, glancing to my right at a teenager crouched about ten feet away. On a clear day I could probably see all the way to Hampstead Heath, although I doubt if the air in London ever gets that clear. It’s like that scene from Mary Poppins where all the chimneysweeps dance across the rooftops twirling their brooms.įrom up here I can just see the dome of the Royal Albert Hall. Read Excerptįrom the pitched slate roof of the Royal Marsden Hospital, if you look between the chimney pots and TV aerials, you see more chimney pots and TV aerials. But when O’Loughlin recognizes the victim as one of his former patients, an emotionally disturbed young woman who nearly brought ruin upon him, O’Loughlin hesitates - a fateful decision that soon places O’Loughlin at the top of the lists of both a bullish detective and a diabolical killer. But when he’s diagnosed with Parkinson’s, O’Loughlin begins to dread the way his exceptional mind has been shackled to a failing body, and the cracks in his perfect existence start to show.Īt first, O’Loughlin is delighted to be called in to a high-profile murder investigation, hoping his extraordinary abilities at perception will help bring a killer to justice.

Renowned psychologist Joseph O’Loughlin has it all - a thriving practice, a devoted, beautiful, fiercely intelligent wife, and a lovely young daughter. The psychological thriller that marked the debut of one of contemporary suspense fiction’s most compelling heroes: “A gripping first novel…taut and fast-moving” ( Washington Post).

Michael robotham the suspect review