In Michael Robotham's gripping When She Was Good, psychologist Cyrus Haven digs into the past of Evie Cormac, the teenage girl he encountered in Good Girl, Bad Girl. As a child, she'd been found, filthy and feral, hiding in a house containing the corpse of a man who'd been tortured to death months earlier. Evie has never spoken about what happened, or even disclosed her real name and age. Authorities put her in a home for troubled teens after concluding the dead man was a pedophile who had kidnapped her.
But Evie is far from safe. A killer is still hunting her, and the only way to stop him is for her and Cyrus to confront her terrifying past and expose the truth about how and why she ended up in that murder house.
The Edgar-nominated Good Girl, Bad Girl establishes the relationship between Cyrus and Evie, but this well-paced follow-up provides sufficient background information. Like Joseph O'Loughlin from Robotham's long-running series, Cyrus is a psychologist with acute insight into the most damaged of people. This comes from having experienced trauma himself in his teenage years, a family tragedy he's still grappling with. He's the only adult Evie trusts with secrets from her past, but she's no damsel needing to be saved. She's strong-willed and resourceful and a "truth wizard," someone who can always spot lies. Though Cyrus and Evie know they will never outrun their demons, their determination to survive and refusal of victimhood are what make this series so powerful. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd