The author of The Secrets She Keeps returns with the first in a series about a teenager named Evie found hidden in a secret room in the aftermath of a terrible crime. When Evie petitions for release from the children's home where she is sent to live, it becomes clear that she has unusual abilities—including a kind of clairvoyance that enables her to know when someone is lying—which makes it difficult for forensic psychologist Cyrus to do his job.
Michael Robotham’s novel Good Girl, Bad Girl will uproot your preconceptions about the meaning of 'good' and 'bad' and scatter them to the winds ... [a] well-written psychological thriller ... one of the greatest aspects of Good Girl, Bad Girl...[is] the burgeoning mutual trust and beautifully depicted development of this relationship [between Evie and Cyrus] ... a satisfying array of suspects and red herrings traipse across the pages ... Good Girl, Bad Girl is an impeccable thriller ... Yet there is still time for the unhurried exploration of two unique, damaged characters.
Thriller writer Michael Robotham...launches a new series that promises both suspenseful narratives and astute psychological insights ... Although the murder case at the center of Good Girl, Bad Girl is solved in a thrilling and satisfying conclusion, Robotham certainly doesn’t tie up all the complicated and tangled threads of Cyrus and Evie’s psyches in this series opener. Readers will be eager to see where this intriguing pair will go next. Their dynamic is, to some extent, reminiscent of the relationship between Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, with each potentially needing something from the other in order to fix their own broken places.
Mr. Robotham definitely knows how to create a suspenseful plot that goes in directions I never expected ... My one quibble with the book has to do with the lack of supporting characters. Both Evie and Cyrus do their best to keep the world at a bit of a distance, and as a result, the novel feels a little sparse ... Even so, Good Girl, Bad Girl is a solid start to what promises to be an engrossing new series. There’s so much more to learn about these people, and I’m confident in Mr. Robotham’s ability to create another blockbuster of a series.
