Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A naked woman in red high-heeled shoes is perched on the edge of Clifton Suspension Bridge with her back pressed to the safety fence, weeping into a mobile phone. Clinical psychologist Joseph O'Loughlin is only feet away, desperately trying to talk her down. She whispers, 'you don't understand,' and jumps.

Later, Joe has a visitor - the woman's teenage daughter, a runaway from boarding school. She refuses to believe that her mother would have jumped off the bridge - not only would she not commit suicide, she is terrified of heights.

Joe wants to believe her, but what would drive a woman to such a desperate act? Whose voice? What evil?

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Why would a woman terrified of heights commit suicide by jumping off a bridge? Psychologist Joe O'Loughlin, who couldn't stop her, wants to know. With a national tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Winner of Australia's Ned Kelly Award for Best Novel, Robotham's compelling fourth thriller (after The Night Ferry) finds clinical psychologist Joe O'Loughlin and his family in Somerset, where he teaches part-time at the University of Bath. When Joe fails to persuade a suicidal woman not to leap from a bridge to her death, he becomes obsessed with understanding the woman's motives. The woman's grief-stricken teenage daughter tracks down Joe, but the police don't take notice until another woman ends up dead under suspicious circumstances. Joe calls on an old friend, retired London detective inspector Vincent Ruiz, and together they race to catch a killer who uses psychological techniques Joe recognizes from his own practice to destroy people. Robotham smoothly mixes Joe's investigation and personal struggles with glimpses into the killer's mind. Even the sharpest readers may not anticipate all of the plot's agile switchbacks or foresee the chilling climax. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Book Review

Can anything else go wrong for clinical psychologist Joe O'Loughlin, threatened by both the police and a sadistic killer in Suspect (2005)? Indeed it can. When naked Christine Wheeler stops before leaping from the Clifton Suspension Bridge, DI Veronica Cray, rightly modest about her ability to talk a potential suicide back from the brink, demands assistance from O'Loughlin. Unfortunately, he provides only a witness to the desperate woman's final words, "You don't understand," before she plunges to her death. Even though the wedding-planning firm Christine ran with her old school friend Sylvia Furness was in deep financial trouble, all the evidence points away from deliberate suicide. Evidently Christine left her house clad only in a transparent raincoat, drove 15 miles to the bridge and then jumped at the behest of whoever was at the other end of her cell phone. Even so, Cray marks the case closed until Sylvia's body is discovered in circumstances that reflect the same modus operandi. Someone had literally talked both women to death. Who could have hated them enough to make them kill themselves in ways so public and humiliating? Working with retired DI Vincent Ruiz, O'Loughlin pieces together a pattern of psychotic revengebut not before the killer zeroes in on his own troubled marriage and proceeds to rip his family apart. Robotham (The Night Ferry, 2007, etc.) sharpens the conventional horrors with his unerring eye for psychological detail, his mastery of pace and his spooky villain, a manipulator as monstrous as Hannibal Lecter. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.