Michael Robotham, Lost

Lost

Michael Robotham

Doubleday, Feb 2006, $24.95

ISBN: 0385508662

From the moment Detective Inspector Vincent Ruiz was fished out of the Thames he knew he was in trouble, as he has no memory how he got there or how he was shot in the leg. Adding to his woes is that a drifting nearby boat contains his blood and that of three other people.

The Met's Anti-Corruption Group, fondly disdained by other cops as the Ghost Squad, John Keebal assumes that Ruiz is using amnesia to cover up wrong doing, including murder, and plans to break the DI. Meanwhile, friendly clinical psychologist Professor Joseph O'Loughlin shows Ruiz a picture of seven year old Mickey Carlyle that the beleaguered cop had on him; Mickey, daughter of Russian crime lord Aleksei Kuznet, was kidnapped three years ago and general wisdom is she is dead, but the amnesiac thinks otherwise. Though still injured, Ruiz and his partner, Detective Constable Alisha "Ali" Kauer Barba, begin to retrace what he LOST.

This powerful gritty police procedural grips the audience from the moment that Ruiz introduces Maggie the nurse to Johnnie One-Eye in the hospital, and never slows down as he tracks his path with his Sikh partner to two diverse nasty scenarios. The investigative storyline is dark and gloomy, though superbly written with a shrewd counter-pace in the hero's personal relationships with for instance his friendship with Joe, a Parkinson's victim. The return of some of the cast including Joe and Vincent from SUSPECT add to the fun time readers will have with this taut thriller.