14. Lying Beside You - Michael Robotham

#3 Cyrus Haven

listened on Audible
352 pgs.
2022
Adult Mystery - British

Finished 2/18/2024
Goodreads rating: 4.31
My rating: 4
Setting: Contemporary Nottingham, England

My comments: Back-and-forth between Cyrus and Evie as we follow the progress of a murder, then kidnapping situation.  The plot drags for the first half, but moves along really well in the second half.  One drawback for me: the narrator makes all the male voices sound like the character's a little bit slow....  And no matter how much I think about it, I cannot come up with any possibilities about why it was titled the way it was. A good story, once it got moving...I plan to read the next in the series while this one is still in my head.

Goodreads synopsis:  Cyrus Haven and Evie Cormac return in Robotham’s latest page-turning, psychological thriller in this series.

If I could tell you one thing about my brother, it would be this. Two days after his nineteenth birthday, he killed our parents and twin sisters because he heard voices in his head. As defining events go, nothing else comes close for Elias, or for me.

As a boy, Cyrus Haven survived a family massacre and slowly pieced his life back together. Now, after almost twenty years, his brother is applying to be released from a secure psychiatric hospital—and Cyrus is expected to forgive Elias and welcome him home.

Elias is returning to a very different world. Cyrus is now a successful psychologist, working with the police, sharing his house with Evie Cormac, a damaged and gifted teenager who can tell when someone is lying. Evie has gone back to school and is working part-time at an inner-city bar, but she continues to struggle with authority and following rules.

When a man is murdered and his daughter disappears, Cyrus is called in to profile the killer and help piece together Maya Kirk’s last hours. Police believe she was drugged and driven away from the same bar where Evie is working. Soon, a second victim is taken, and Evie is the only person who glimpsed the man behind the wheel.

But there’s a problem. Only two people believe her. One is Cyrus.