Close Your Eyes
Iris Johansen & Roy Johansen
Kendra was born blind and spent years honing her remaining senses in order to avoid danger. After a stem cell operation restores her eyesight at age 20 years, her uncanny perceptions make the FBI call her in for case after case where they are baffled and she can solve a crime scene by simply walking in the door.
This novel was trying to see itself by other reviewers as a ‘thriller [and] a titillating delight’. Sorry, the sexual tension that Kendra seems to feel towards Lynch isn’t even that tensioned for me as a reader. I saw it, yes, but the gripping storyline was what did it for me.
If you liked Angel Killer, you’re going to love this one. This one does have some danger to Kendra herself, so if that’s your thing, this is going to tick the right boxes. Ok, so some of this one is a bit gorey and I really wanted to look away, but other times it just made me sympathise with Kendra even more.
I didn’t see this as a thriller, because I didn’t make the connection with a couple of ‘coincidences’. That being said, I kept reading and reading because I couldn’t work out what might happen next. I was sad when I finished it, because it hadn’t explained all the questions I had – but that just left us in the same position as Kendra.
This reminded me of the movie ‘The Librarian’, where the guy is just so geeky he can work out random things about others from the merest hints. Being so observant seems to make people a bit prickly though. I wouldn’t like people much either!
This was a fantastic novel that a publisher sent me, and that I ended up reading anyway even though it was an ebook. That’s what being stuck in an airport for 2 hours does to you, it makes you read ebooks when you’re too lazy to pack a novel in your carry on (because you are supposed to be working). I’ve giving it 4 stars.
Macmillan Australia | July 2016 | $9.99 AU | ebook
This novel takes both its name and its conversational writing style In the ‘tradition’ of 
If this novel had been billed as an expose of what it looks like when a family is ripped apart by a disappearance, then maybe I could have gotten into it. Even then, it was too caught up in what Sam felt for anything else to really come through. I never want to be in that position.
As long as you can get past the extreme amounts of explicit swearing in the prologue and first chapter, you’ll be golden for reading this novel. If that sort of thing bothers you, I advise skipping straight ahead. I put the book down and tried to take a nap instead of keeping reading at that point. Anyway, I persevered and it got better from there.
This is the novel of when parenting isn’t smooth sailing. Or perhaps, just parenting in general. It takes a look at how men and women somehow change in the months following their child’s birth, and yet hopefully stay the same.
I couldn’t work out what the main part of this novel was. Finding someone? Yes, ok. Saving a magazine? Yes, ok. Exposing some sort of crime? Yes, ok. Character development? Nope. Boring stuff about jobs that I didn’t care about? Oh, yes. None of the action happened in the first half. I wanted to love it, I really did.
This book was such a disappointment. All the exciting things promised in the blurb turned out to be completely predictable. The grand secret? Meh. I wasn’t that convinced that her dad had done anything wrong. It’s hard to cope with children, of any kind!
This book was actually enjoyable. I was hesitant. As I say though, Reed is from the people angle. After his son’s accident, he’s one of the people who have pushed forward from the ground up to make a difference in politics to change ordinary people’s lives. As a geneticist, this gets into all sorts of ethical ideas and messes, some of which are discussed here.
I’m not sure what I was expecting from this novel. I wanted something fantasy because I was sick of teenage drama. No fear here – a scrap of ‘isn’t she pretty’, but otherwise fantasy running wild. Very satisfying and light to read.