From the blurb I knew I was going to love the story and very sadly I didn’t.

I couldn’t feel anything for any of the characters because there is no character history nor anything endearing.

This could be a great novel with some character work.

This is told in two parts, then and now and from two points of view, Asher and Tia. I found it to be a bit of a frustrating read, confusing and a bit disjointed due to the pacing. The siege scenes were quite dramatic but I was left feeling disappointed at the ending. thanks to Net Galley for my ARC.

Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

I enjoyed this book but would have liked to see the back stories fleshed out a little more.

I requested this book as I loved The Interpreter and whilst I don't think this one reached the same dizzy heights is her debut novel, this again showed just how impressive an author she is.

Recommended to all

I am afraid that I wasn't grabbed by this book I wasn't very taken by the characters and didn't really connect with the book. Hopefully other readers will enjoy it more.

The Negotiator sounded promising. Tia is a former Met officer who wanted to be a negotiator but failed the course. Then she, by chance, found herself a hostage when a radical environmental group attacked a museum. The second lead character is Asher, a rather naive first year student who is well out of his depth when what he thought was a simple publicity stunt turns into a armed seige.

The novel is told in twin timelines: the story of the siege and three years later, as Asher is released from prison and Tia tries to rebuild her career, feeling responsible for failing to keep everyone alive in the initial incident. This approach makes the narrative arc a little confusing in places, as both characters react to the aftermath of events that the reader doesn't fully understand.

The novel seems to run out of steam after a good start. The siege episodes are dramatic, but the pace immediately falls again in the later timeline . And neither lead character feels strong enough, or sympathetic enough, to carry the story.

I shared other reviewers’ concerns about the plausibility of Brooke Robinson’s debut thriller, The Interpreter, but ultimately found the writing compelling enough for it to work for me, despite the weird inconsistency of the central protagonist. The Negotiator, therefore, is a bit of a let-down. It’s told principally from the point of view of two characters: Tia, a former police officer, and Asher, who has just been released from prison. We discover early in the novel that both were involved in a siege at a London art museum three years ago: Asher was a member of the environmental activist group who took Tia and some others hostage, while Tia tried to negotiate with the activists despite having been turned down for a negotiator job with the Met. In the present day, Tia is now investigating a series of threatening notes that are being sent to the survivors of the siege, and which have already caused one man to take his own life.

This thriller was frustratingly intercut between the past and present, which kept breaking the tension for me, as the siege sections were, unsurprisingly, tense, but the present-day plot felt weak. I don’t think Robinson successfully built much intrigue around the threatening-notes plot, as nobody ever seemed to be in real danger. Tia, too, felt like a distraction: she increasingly annoyed me as a protagonist, which I think was because she kept centring herself and her own ‘failures’ in the account of the siege, which felt self-indulgent, especially because she was not there in a professional role. Asher was the only fully developed character, but even his plot fell off the rails at the end for the sake of a last-minute twist, which undercut the otherwise satisfying ending of his arc. And I continue to be uncomfortable with thrillers that portray environmental activists as extremist and violent, given the public hostility groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil already attract for their non-violent protests. Unlike Clare Mackintosh’s egregious Hostage, Robinson is at least careful to point out that this kind of event is not typical, and doesn’t demonise all the protesters, but it still doesn’t sit right with me, especially when The Negotiator largely fails to engage with the concerns these activists raise.

I think Robinson can write, but I’d like to see her try something more character-led, because this kind of plotting doesn’t seem to be her strong point (which is fair enough!).