Eyes Wide Open

I enjoy reading an exciting thriller to liven up a long plane ride or an afternoon by the pool, but even in my vacation reads, I don’t want to put up with lazy writing. There are three key things I ask for in a thriller: a tightly constructed plot, characters I can worry about, and a high level of suspense. Unfortunately, Andrew Gross’s new novel Eyes Wide Open doesn’t deliver on any of those.

The novel opens with a well-worn thriller cliche: a mysterious man follows a woman to her remote house, where she finds her dog murdered. Just then, the man steps through the doorway, holding a knife. Cut to a scene of a young man standing on a high rock in a bay off the California coast, while a voice exhorts him to jump to his death. These show more hooks are designed to pull us into the story proper, and they succeed, for a short time.

Upon learning of his nephew Evan’s suicide, Dr. Jay Erlich flies to California to console his brother and sister-in-law, who are both mentally unstable and wards of the state. Unsatisfied with the medical treatment his nephew received--he was hospitalized just before his suicide--Jay digs into the circumstances surrounding the death and begins to suspect that Evan was murdered. He enlists Detective Sherwood, an investigator for the coroner, to help with his convoluted investigation.

They uncover a connection to an infamous criminal, Russell Houvnanian. In the 60s, Russell was the charismatic leader of a commune who convinced several of his followers to savagely murder several people. If this scenario sounds familiar, it’s no coincidence; Houvnanian is a thinly disguised Charles Manson. Perhaps Gross depends too much on his readers’ familiarity with the Manson murders, as he supplies only the barest details of the pivotal murders, and his villains remain two-dimensional caricatures of the most well-known members of the Manson family.

Gross fails to bring any of his other characters to life, either. None of them manage to rise above the level of cliche: there is the heroic doctor and family man caught up in the mystery; his brother, the aging hippie and drug addict; and the cynical cop taking on one last case. We can’t worry about characters when we haven’t come to care about them.

Gross’s writing style is also lackluster and relies too heavily on overused tropes of the genre. He tries to build tension by stringing together jerky sentence fragments and super-short paragraphs, but these devices soon become tiresome. He shifts willy-nilly from a first-person narrator to third-person point of view, a stylistic choice that seems to serve no purpose other than to jar the reader out of the story. He hammers home critical plot points as they are uncovered, not trusting the reader to keep up. Often, a character learns a piece of information in one chapter and then repeats that exact same information to another character in the next chapter, almost word for word. The net effect is to invite the reader to skim, or to put the book down altogether.

I’m sorry to say that Eyes Wide Open does not satisfy any of my requirements for an entertaining thriller. If you’re looking for a good vacation read, I’d have to advise you to look elsewhere.

I received an advance review copy of this book for early review. Article first published as Book Review: Eyes Wide Open by Andrew Gross on Blogcritics. I wrote this review and retain rights to republish it. (2011) show less

I'm afraid I can't concur with most of the reviews here. The author's note at the end of the book explained to me why Mr. Gross wrote the book and I can certainly see that it was a therapeutic activity for him. His family tragedy formed the seed for this book but it essentially was not enough to justify the Manson-like nature of the plot. The thriller aspects of the plot took away any drama I felt for the family's tragedy and the hanging ending, begging for a sequel, really left me cold.

There were too many loose ends that led nowhere (maybe these will be followed in the sequel) but I felt, halfway through the book, that enough story lines had been introduced to reduce the effect of any one of them. It devolved into a common thriller show more which lessened the impact of the originating story.

After reading the other reviews here I concur completely with that of Johnfgaines.

I will not be reading any more books by Mr. Gross. show less

I finished this book about a week ago and resisted an urge to write about it right away. I’m glad I waited because when I finished the book I felt the characters of Jay’s brother and his wife were shallow, without any substance. Since then I realized that people with the kind of problems Charlie and Gabby dealt with are not deep, they tend to wear their hearts on their sleeve so Andrew nailed it with those characters.

The Hero, Jay Erlich, is a loving father and successful doctor. While celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary with his wife Kathy he receives a call from his half-brother Charlie. Charlie suffers with bi-polar disorder and lives a heavily medicated life from prescribed medicines and some recreational ones as well. show more Charlie has some terrible news; Jay’s nephew, Charlie’s only son, is dead.

Always close, Jay feels a responsibility to fly from the East Coast to California to help Charlie and his wife Gabriella cope with this devastating loss. This is where I mistakenly took Charlie and Gabby to be shallow characters, one dimensional because of their lack of initiative when it appears that Evan may not have killed himself. The police are calling it a suicide but Jay just can’t quite bring himself to accept that. Charlie insists the Evan would not commit suicide and as Jay digs further into the mystery it begins to appear that Charlie may be right.

What start’s as a disturbed young man’s death and his equally disturbed parents inability to cope with the matter quickly becomes a game of hide and seek with elements of Charlie’s past. The excitement ramps up and the action moves quickly.

The action keeps tensions high as events unfold and the story gets more than a little frightening as Jay closes in on the truth. Charlie’s past is haunting him and not just from his memories. The story comes to an exciting but tragic end when Jay exposes the truth, but the truth comes with a great cost.

This is a great read with lots of action and intense emotional intrigue but it had an extra quality that I couldn’t quantify until I got to the author’s notes at the end of the book. This story was inspired by a personal tragedy Andrew Gross experienced. You can feel this while you are reading the book. show less

Does anyone ever lose a close relative to suicide and not ask themselves, 'What could I have done to prevent this?'

There aren't always complete, wrapped up reasons to explain suicide. Pardon the pun, but Grossman comes up with a novel idea to write around a personal tragedy that seemingly had no answer. Just like your brain working out the day's conflicts in night dreams, Eyes Wide Open succeeds in providing context and reasonableness to something infinitely unreasonable, while at the same time, sending us on a fast-paced, frightful journey into broken minds. Even if the short, choppy chapters occasionally bring you out of the story too much, overall the book is a suspenseful ride you'll be glad you took.

Having read a few of the Women's Murder Club mysteries co-authored by Andrew Gross and James Patterson, I was expecting a fast-paced, tightly-plotted thriller. EYES WIDE OPEN did not disappoint. It also tapped into some unresolved fears I didn't know I had about cult-type mass murders from my teenage years. The characters were believable, and their actions were consistent with their own reality. And this is a quick read -- not too much deep thinking required of the reader, and it's so darn compelling that you just blaze through it to find out what's happening on the next page!

Eyes Wide Open, a fictional mystery inspired by actual events, opens with Jay Erlich, a surgeon in New York, getting word that his nephew committed suicide by jumping off of Moro Rock in California. This mirrors closely the actual death of the author’s nephew. In the book the reader learns that Evan, the fictional nephew, may have been the victim of shady, or at least negligent practices at the hands of the authorities who were supposedly treating him for his bipolar disorder. Jay flies out to be with his brother and, while there, starts investigating the events surrounding Evan’s death.

Up to this point, the book closely mirrors the actual suicide of the author’s own nephew and I get the impression that one of the reasons this show more story was written was to allow Andrew Gross an opportunity to work through his grief and anger over this senseless death.

Spoiler warning

At this point in the book I was puzzled as to how this book was going to turn out. Was there some sort of fantastical hospital conspiracy ala Robin Cook that Dr. Erlich was going to ferret out or was it somehow connected to the time decades before when Jay’s brother, Charlie, lived on a ranch with a hippy commune headed by a charismatic ex-con who went on to lead many of them on a highly publicized killing spree? I did say this was inspired by actual events, didn’t I?

Having come of age in the late 1960s, I still remember the aura of fear surrounding the Manson murders. The murder of one of the attorneys during the trial made many people think that the horror was far from over. The question as to whether such a character has mystical powers that he can use to strike out at his enemies from even the securest prison provides rich fields for an imaginative author such as Andrew Gross to frolic in.

I found Eyes Wide Open to be an enjoyable, if not entirely credible, read with equal measures of mystery and thriller. These kept me going despite some choppiness, that might have been improved by better editing. As an example two chapters, specifically chapters 62 and 65, appear to serve the same purpose. Both divulge the exact same information to the reader. The only difference is that chapter 62 is written from the point of view of the detective who learns certain pieces of information in conversations with other officers whereas chapter 65 is written from Jay’s perspective as the detective passes the same information on to him. My impression from reading the two chapters is that Andrew Gross was undecided as to how to present this information and wrote up the scene from two different POVs and that both ended up being published, possibly by accident. It doesn’t really detract from the story and does give the reader an intriguing sense of getting an illicit peak at the man behind the curtain.

The review copy of this book was obtained from the publisher via the LibraryThing Earler Reviewer program. show less

This is a fictional thriller involving actual events, it describes the lives and families of two different brothers, the Erlich's. Jay a surgeon from New York, gets a call from his brother Charlie, saying, "that his son, "Evan" has been found dead at the bottom of a cliff of an apparent suicide". All of Charlie's family have been diegnosed with bipolar and are living on Social Security checks, just making ends meat. Jay goes out to California to comfort his brother's family, while out there he notices that this might not have been a suicide, but foul play might have been involved, now the mystery unfolds. I really enjoyed this novel, it kept the pages turning, not wanting to put it down till the end.