Go behind the headlines of Baghdad, London and Washington, with a journalist at his criminal-writing best

THERE ARE thriller writers, and then, there are those who take readers behind the enemy lines and then proceed to blur all such lines—leaving them confused. Michael Robotham’s The Wreckage doesn’t follow the usual goodguy, bad-guy logic. He treats all his characters, even the basest of them, with a humanity that makes readers pause and rethink. More than the plot or pace (which are both impeccable, by the way), it’s characters who make readers turn the pages. He creates an excellent bunch of them through Ruiz, Luca, Daniela and Holly, and makes the readers care enough to fear for their lives. Robotham’s background in journalism makes him an intelligent writer who keeps his prose crisp as news—this could very well be a non-fiction. The action begins in Baghdad, where the half- American and half-Iraqi, Luca Terracini, is trying to trace billions of dollars worth of missing funds from Iraqi banks. His skin colour and mastery over Arabic helps him infiltrate the darkest corners of the Iraq War. During his investigations, he meets UN representative and accountant, Daniela Garner, also trying to trace millions of missing funds. As they form a team, their investigations begin to unravel a web that spreads to London and Washington. In London, Richard North, an investment banker and perhaps the only man who has any clue to the missing money, gets robbed by Holly Knight and her boyfriend. Soon afterward, he vanishes and Holly finds herself being pursued. She then forms an unlikely alliance with Vincent Ruiz, an ex-policeman and a man she had robbed earlier. However, in this labyrinthine plot the main motivation is the money—and who has it, who wants it and who is ultimately going to pay, are factors that move the racy plot forward. Michael Robotham was born in Australia in 1960 and grew up in small country towns till he became a cadet journalist in an afternoon newspaper in Sydney. He remained a journalist for 14 years, writing for newspapers and magazines in Australia, Britain and America. In 1993, he quit journalism to become a ghostwriter, collaborating with politicians, pop stars, psychologists, adventurers and showbusiness personalities to write autobiographies. Twelve of these non-fiction titles were bestsellers with combined sales of more than two million copies.