Brought to you by OBS reviewer Scott

This book’s subject is not for the faint of heart, yet is all too real to dismiss readily. Suicidal people, those who wish to “catch the bus” as Cathy Vasas-Brown puts it quaintly, meet on an internet forum and seek out the means to their ends in the company of other like-minded individuals. Enter the chilling world of The Monitor an urban crime novel focused around police investigator Carolyn Lapham’s unravelling of a puzzle that exposes suicide cases as probable murders. Like most good crime stories, The Monitor has a ready cast of friends, acquaintances, personalities and individuals that dangle like tangled threads that need unravelling. Caught up in the sometimes witty prose, I found myself tending to get lost in this tale of despair, yet could not put the book down – a well-seasoned sign of a good thriller.

Although taking place in the fictional suburbanized town of Cypress Village, Oregon, the setting and places are extremely realistic, and with the omnipresent internet, the drama could play out in any sizable town in North America.  The characters are equally three dimensional beings with whom the readers can empathize. Knowing the characters’ inner most thoughts engaged me directly with the protagonists and antagonists; and over the course of Carolyn’s and her partner Ziggy’s investigations; and Joshua’s dealings with Yoshi, a house-bound, despondent youth; openings are formed that link the puzzle pieces together in such a way that they fall neatly into place at the end of the novel, like a good contemporary crime novel should.

The moral and ethical crux of the book lies in the subject of suicide or assisted suicide itself. While neither pro-choice nor anti-choice in the novel, the thought of it eats away at the very fabric of your being. Imagining the hopelessness, desperation and futility of the interjected postings of the sometimes clinically depressed people on the forum, the reader is left as helpless as they are when the end comes. Had it been presented in any other way, I believe that this nature of the suicide dilemma would be lost. Tying it to a real life phenomenon gave the book extra kudos and a more pressing realism.

Looking through the lens of Carolyn, a hard edged cop whose husband has left her after he had an affair, her twin brother Joshua, a social worker for troubled youths at the 3F house, and the monitor, a mysterious lurker on the suicide forum that is ready to grant the troubled members their very wishes, gives precisely enough room for this mystery to play out. The pace starts out slow, the strands of the mystery slowly growing, building to a crescendo when the web is spun then plummets down catching the reader in its trap and then back up again as they claw their way back out. The Monitor left me satisfied with the novel’s complete closure.

Overall, the novel is well constructed, the characterization is vivid and it is poignant in today’s society, it garnered my interest and delivered what it promised. For fans of crime fiction, suspense thrillers, or the lovers of mystery, The Monitor delivers in spades.

*OBS would like to thank the author for supplying a free copy of this title in exchange for an honest review*