Stephanie Jones: Book Review - Life Or Death by Michael Robotham

Populated as it is by broken lives filled with misfirings and sent off course by simple strokes of hard luck, Michael Robotham’s Life or Death might be difficultl for some to take pleasure in, but at its heart is the enduring love harboured by an incarcerated man, and the lengths to which he will go to right a decade-old wrong.

Robotham’s unvarnished style infuses the novel with an air of edgy desperation and a passion shared by protagonist and creator; in a foreword, Robotham says the idea for the novel has been percolating for his entire writing career – during which he has published nine previous crime thrillers – but he needed time to do it justice.

The premise is simple; the day before he is due to be released from prison for his role in a 2004 armoured truck hijacking in which his two fellow hijackers and a security guard died, 33-year-old Audie Palmer escapes from prison. He has been solitary and stoic, refusing to bend to the hierarchical, violently clique-ish culture and enduring countless assaults for his stance.

Enter FBI Special Agent Desiree Furness, of whose diminutive stature Robotham makes a bit too much in a bid to show the awkwardness of her position as a high-achieving woman in a man’s world. She has been watching the Palmer case since he was transferred to the prison in Texas from which he escapes, and it is clear she has both the empathy and intelligence to take Palmer as she eventually finds him. Whether innocent or guilty of the crimes for which he was convicted, she may be the only person prepared to give him a fair hearing. As it transpires, there are a fair few crims hunting the fugitive Audie, and the FBI is the least of his troubles.

The first port of call for investigators is Audie’s long-time cell neighbour, Moses Palmer, who cannot speak to what motivated the break-out, though he knows that the truck’s $7 million cargo remains missing, and that Palmer barely survived being shot in the head during the incident.

It comes as no surprise that with a small fortune out there in the ether, bad people are willing to do worse things to track it down. Preventing the novel descending into a parade of ugliness is the occasional caustic aside you might expect from the Australian Robotham; for instance, that the plug wasn’t pulled on the comatose Audie because Texas only executes people on death row, not when they’re brain-dead – otherwise it might mean culling most of the politicians.

The theme of corruption is pervasive and well-exercised, with those who have a stake in the whereabouts of Audie and the cash ranging from the sheriff who first responded to the hijacking to a state senator who was the district attorney in Audie’s prosecution and a property magnate and corporate raider who has funded that senator’s career.

Very few characters are not morally compromised, and only the short-lived family at the centre of the story, the memory of which drives Audie’s desperate crusade, has any purity. Indeed, Robotham betrays a view of the human condition that stops just short of nihilism: “Mostly we are victims of circumstance or prisoners of fate.” In Life or Death, destiny can visit in the form of a killer earthquake or random violence, and is ineluctable in every case.