The Other Wife by Michael Robotham goes parental

Crime-solving psychologist Joe O’Loughlin is back but he’s thrown a curve ball by his sick dad’s mistress.

Author Michael Robotham has released the ninth Joe O’Loughlin crime thriller.

In The Other Wife, the ninth crime thriller featuring English psychologist Joe O’Loughlin, Michael Robotham has produced a fine novel, by turns elegiac, chagrined and defiant. On a broad plane, the book may be read as a mature narrator’s account of unwelcome ­decline at multiple levels: personal, political and cultural.

Joe is now an ageing baby boomer, closer to 60 than 50, and confronting the imminent loss of elderly parents and the discomforting fact of his own mixed feelings about them. He goes through acute emotional shifts as successive revelations force him to alter his long-held attitudes towards his father, William the Medical Giant, and William’s closest associates, some of whom Joe has known all his life.

During his progress towards discovering whether William has had a Mr Hyde outlet to match his Dr Jekyll career, Joe must acknowledge a few similar­ities between his own tendencies and his father’s.

The tone of the opening ­paragraphs is sombre yet expect­ant. Surveying the city of London from a height, Joe sees it first as a readied sound stage, then as a layered construction “built upon the ruins of the past”. In a wobbly analogy, Joe regards himself as “a broken man, built upon the wreckage of my past”.

It is for the sake of his dependent daughters, Joe explains, that he must endure both his grief since the death of his wife and the ­unstoppable bodily deterioration caused by “Mr Parkinson … a cruel puppeteer”. Teen and pre-teen girls have been a persisting presence in this series, whether as children of the ­protagonist, victims of criminals set on abduction and confinement, or both.

While this may not have been to all ­readers’ tastes, especially when the content ­offered fodder for the prurient, Sydney-based Roboth­am deserves credit for the authenticity of his portrayals of adolescents and the ­complex of emotions and behaviours that being a parent to girls stimulates.

The Other Wife by Michael Robotham

True to form, Joe is talking with a psychiatrist about his younger daughter’s reactions to her ­mother’s death when a new ­cluster of challenges presents ­itself. He learns that his 80-year-old father has been hospitalised with head injuries.

Soon he will find the person sitting by the hospital bedside is not his mother but another woman, who introduces herself as the comatose patient’s “other wife” before being escorted away by police. Then a neurosurgeon will inform him his father suffered violent blows to the back of his head; and he’ll spot old bruises on his father’s body.

In telling this story of longstanding duplic­ities, Robotham stays true to his practice of melding subgenres. There are elements of the police procedural, the buddy movie, the cosy mystery, the action thriller and the financial krimi. Fans will recognise reworked plot elements­. For one, there is the large house in which one or two people die late at night, with diverse other persons becoming suspects as they are found to have been inside or at the door during the evening. Character types recur, too: the dangerously drug-addicted young man, the senior police officer with oafish table manners. Plot developments are steadily paced across 22 days, with Joe chasing leads while his three sisters and their mother share out bedside shifts, holding at bay the other claimant to wife status and bedside rights. The passivity of these sisters, who one would expect to be actively pursuing explanations and justice, serves the plot design, freeing Joe to own the crusading knight role. He does so at the cost of the sisters’ credibility and his own — a difficulty in a series that prides itself on psychological truthfulness.

Across the series, Joe’s unappealing traits have coexisted unproblematically with his manifold good qualities. In this novel they seem more obvious, perhaps jolted into ­prominence by the family crisis. He brags about his observational skills and deductions, even producing show-off riffs a la Benedict Cumberbatch’s TV Sherlock Holmes, though to my mind the details he reports seeing are those any attentive adult would notice.

Joe is a dedicated explainer, possibly at the behest of Robotham’s international editors and translators second-guessing mainstream readerships’ knowledge. He also likes to have the last, paragraph-length, word. “I’ve been a psychologist for nearly 30 years and I’ve never met the perfect parents of a perfect child,” he nags when trying to excuse a harmful act by his younger daughter.

All in all, Joe has more in common with his father’s conservative, authoritarian side than he would care to concede. It is one thing for William’s long-time lawyer to have a private estate with alarmingly fascistic overtones. But what is to be made of Joe’s jaded mutterings in favour of a benign dictatorship?

Joe is prone to recollections that provide analogies. Recounting a dispute that ­happened when he was 15, he describes ­standing up for a teenage girl who was being bothered by skinheads. He ended up bashed and in hospital. “Playing the white knight again,” as his late wife might have remarked. Always the white knight, especially where there are teenage girls to be protected.

In his acknowledgments, Robotham writes: “The Other Wife may well be the last Joe O’Loughlin novel.”

With Joe’s elder daughter studying to be a forensic psychologist, and his love interest a police officer, I’m ­tipping that we’ll hear from Joe again, even if the narration is shared.

Robyn Walton is a writer and critic.

The Other Wife

By Michael Robotham

Hachette, 386pp, $32.99