A
prisoner serving a ten-year stretch for a violent armed robbery decides to
escape. Nothing earth shattering there, except he chooses to break out of
prison just one day prior to his release. Why? That’s the intriguing premise of
Michael Robotham’s fast-paced thriller Life and Death.
Robotham
is an author I had not encountered before and I read this book with interest,
always keen to discover a new thriller writer. He did not disappoint. This is a
fast paced read, mostly told in third-person, present tense, which keeps the
tension zinging along nicely. Past tense is fine of course, many authors choose
to write in past tense, but you know then that the narrator must survive, at
least up to the point where he can narrate the tale. While logically we know
that the hero Audie Palmer is going to live at least until the end of the novel,
this is a thriller after all with certain conventions to observe, the present
tense gave an urgency, a sense of peril, that was hard to escape.
Many
crime thrillers seem excessively violent these days, especially those of the
ever-popular serial killer genre. While Life and Death certainly contains
violence and doesn’t shy away from some description, on the whole it doesn’t
fall for these easy tropes; and whilst it’s a heist novel of sorts I found it
refreshingly original in places. The characterisation is good, albeit Audie
seems a little too Zen at times, and the plotting was spot on.
If I
have one criticism it’s that it was never really resolved to my satisfaction
why he needed to escape at all. Without giving away spoilers, the main
character feels he has to avoid being killed by the bad guys upon his release.
But I found this lacked credibility. Surely they wouldn’t kill him as soon as he
stepped out of the gates, prisons being surrounded by CCTV after all. Surely it
would have been easier to try and lose them when they inevitably followed him
upon his release? But this is a minor quibble with an otherwise faultless
thriller and I easily found myself willing to suspend disbelief and go along
for the ride.
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