Book Summary and Reviews of Lying Beside You by Michael Robotham

Lying Beside You by Michael Robotham

Lying Beside You

Cyrus Haven Series #3

by Michael Robotham

  • Critics' Consensus (2):
  • Published:
  • Feb 2023, 352 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Cyrus Haven and Evie Cormac return in Robotham's latest page-turning, psychological thriller in this "gripping and eerie" (Karin Slaughter) series, reaffirming why Stephen King has proclaimed this author "an absolute master."

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.

The other is the killer.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"[An] expertly paced and psychologically acute novel...[with] insightfully drawn characters and [a] superb sense of place that the author conjures up with laconic ease, razor-sharp wit, and, above all, compassion.... Gripping and insightful." - Kirkus (starred review)

"Robotham does a good job infusing suspense into the well-constructed plot, but at the end of the day this series is all about Cyrus and Evie. While pairings of older male investigators with younger female protégés are fairly common in crime fiction, Cyrus and Evie stand out from the pack. Readers will want to see a lot more of them." - Publishers Weekly

"The guy can't write a bad book. This is one of his best, suspenseful and hard to put down." - Stephen King

"A riveting page-turner." - Megan Goldin, author of The Night Swim

This information about Lying Beside You was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Michael Robotham Author Biography

Michael Robotham is a former investigative journalist whose bestselling psychological thrillers have been translated into twenty-five languages. He has twice won a Ned Kelly Award for Australia's best crime novel, for Lost in 2005 and Shatter in 2008. His recent novels include When She Was Good, winner of the UK's Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for best thriller; The Secrets She Keeps; Good Girl, Bad Girl; When You Are Mine; Lying Beside You; Storm Child; and The White Crow. After living and writing all over the world, Robotham settled his family in Sydney, Australia.

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