Shatter (Joseph O'Loughlin, #3)
Michael Robotham
Joe O'Loughlin is on familiar territory—standing on a bridge high above a flooded gorge, trying to stop a distraught woman from jumping. She is naked, wearing only high-heel shoes, sobbing into a cell phone. Suddenly, she turns to him and whispers, “You don’t understand,” and lets go. Joe is shattered by the suicide and haunted by his failure to save the woman, until her teenage daughter finds him and reveals that her mother would never have committed suicide—not like that. She was terrified of heights. Compelled to investigate, Joe is soon obsessed with discovering who was on the other end of the phone. What could have driven her to commit such a desperate act? Whose voice? What evil? Having devoted his career to repairing damaged minds, Joe must now confront an adversary who tears them apart: a man who searches for the cracks in a person’s psyche and claws his fingers inside, destroying what makes them whole.
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This was a very slow-paced listen for me. Typically I listen to 2-4 audiobooks per day, but this one took several days and didn’t really entertain me—it’s just very dull.
I borrowed it because the blurb was very intriguing and gave me the impression that it’d be suspenseful. It wasn’t.
We do get alternating POVs between Joe (hero) and the antagonist but … it’s not always clear which is speaking. Perhaps another format would eliminate this but for me, there’s just one narrator and he uses the same voice, tone, etc. for both characters so … each time there’s a change, it takes me a few moments to figure out there’s been a change … and in the interim, there’s minor confusion. This doesn’t do the experience any favors when I’m already bored.
I didn’t DNF it, as I kept waiting for it to get interesting, but sadly it never did.
Though … there was a round of body-shaming. Just as I was trying to decide whether to give this author another chance! So that solved that decision for me.
Overall: disappointing.
2 stars.
⭐️ ⭐️
Audio:
Nothing special. Voice was okay, but there’s no performance—this narrator sounds much like a robot. 2-star performance.
Thank goodness this was a library loan and not a purchase, as it’d have been a waste of money.
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