Close My Eyes

Sophie McKenzie is a well-known YA author who I first encountered when her teen thriller 'Blood Ties' was nominated for the Berkshire Book Award. (It was short listed for various other prizes and also won a fair few similar awards.) I was excited when I spotted this, her first thriller for an adult audience, and hoped it would live up to my expectations.

What's it about?

Geniver Loxley lost her daughter, Beth, eight years ago. Since then, she has struggled to move on, while her husband has built a business empire. One day a stranger appears on her doorstep and tells her what she longs to hear: her daughter is alive. Could this be true? Gen is determined to find out, even if it means doubting her husband, her friends and her own show more sanity.

What's it like?

Quietly engrossing, then increasingly dramatic. I was initially drawn-in by the portrait of a couple living their everyday lives, considering IVF, long married and no longer completely in tune with each other. Then - bam! The stranger arrives with her news at the end of chapter one. I like that McKenzie starts the action quickly (too many books seem to reveal half their plot in the blurb, so you're left itching to move beyond your expectations) and the way her protagonist, Gen, is subsequently unsettled, slowly reaching into the murky past.

The characters are well-drawn and there's plenty of doubt. Is Gen being conned? Can she trust her husband, Art, who seems desperate to leave Beth behind them? Is Art's old friend Lorcan trying to cause mischief or does he really want to help Gen? And why is Gen's best friend, Hen, colluding with Gen's husband behind her back? I found the first couple of hundred pages gripping as I strove to decipher the truth, but when the truth began to surface I was dubious.

Reflections

The truth about Beth Loxley is far-fetched and there's a lot of talking required to even begin to explain it, though if you accept the personalities McKenzie has taken care to establish, it all does make perfect (albeit twisted) sense. I felt the ending was a little OTT too, but again, if you really consider what's at stake, it's probably not. I think when I was reading I became almost irritated by the solution McKenzie created, but on reflection I'm not sure why. Possibly I was irritated by other, mostly very minor, details.

Why, oh why, is Gen incapable of moving forward without male support? (Why is this true of so many female protagonists? Why do none of them ever have real best friends they can rely on to help them solve their problems? Best friends who don't just assume they're mental? I assume the answer is partly that two women working co-operatively and sensibly to resolve issues wouldn't be as thrilling, but why not? Does there really always HAVE to be sexual tension involved?) Why is she called Gen? What kind of name is 'Art'? Or 'Hen'?

Despite the minor irritations outlined above, I did enjoy this and thought it worked really well as a thriller. McKenzie makes effective use of red herrings and retains ambiguity over who can be trusted for a long time. She also effectively interweaves the main story with a few snippets of diary like text from a young child. It is unclear for a long time who the child is, but once the reader realises who it is, the diary voice helps provide a thoroughly chilling conclusion to the story.

Final thoughts

This novel is described as a 'nerve-jangling thriller for fans of Gillian Flynn and Sophie Hannah' on the back cover and I completely agree. However, the converse is also true. If you thought 'Gone Girl' implausible or that 'Little Face' involved too many long explanations of motives then this might not suit you.

As for me, I enjoyed this sufficiently to keep an eye out for more by Sophie McKenzie and the blurb for her second adult thriller, 'Trust in Me', sounds intriguing. Hopefully next time I'll feel completely gripped throughout. show less

What a suspenseful psychological thriller author, Sophie McKenzie, has spun! We find Geniver Loxley still stuck and despondent eight years after the stillbirth of her daughter, Beth. Her husband Art, is wildly successful and thrilled to be brought into the Prime Minister's inner circle. He's a bit of a celebrity, garnering lots of attention and showing little to his wife. He pushes Gen to try again for a child of their own and go for IVF treatments in order to help her move forward of "stuck". Gen's unsure. Beth haunts her dreams; Gen is consumed by thoughts of her - the wonderful young eight year old girl she could have become.
Then a knock at the door is heard. Lucy O'Donnell tells Gen that her baby was born alive and whisked away. show more Furthermore, Gen's husband was in on it. This Lucy had learned from her sister, upon her sister's deathbed - the sister who, as a nurse, attended Beth's birth. Lucy's motives are not pure. She and her husband, who recently lost his job, are short on funds to support their family. Lucy thinks that this revelation is worth some money. Surely Gen and her celebrity husband have plenty of it to spare.
This news sends Gen reeling. She doesn't know what to to believe, whom to trust and where to turn. But it appears to be her wake-up call as she starts pursuing clues wherever they will take her. Gen wonders whether this news could be true. She wants it to be true. Or is she just going mad?!
This read was a thrill a minute and I just couldn't put the book down. show less

Read from May 12 to 13, 2013

About a third of the way in, I couldn't put this book down. I felt like I was becoming crazy paranoid right along with Gen (the main character). The ending was fantastic and the book went to places I REALLY didn't see coming.

Definitely a read-alike for fans of Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson and Into the Darkest Corner by Elizabeth Haynes.

"Of course, what I didn't realise then is that grief, like the seasons, is cyclical. I would just start to feel open to life again, then find myself thrust back under the water, drowning in loss."

Geniver Loxley lost her daughter Beth in a stillbirth eight years ago, and has been struggling ever since. When a stranger turns up on her doorstep, claiming that Beth is still alive and that there was a huge conspiracy to have Geniver believe that Beth is dead, and then that stranger is killed in a hit-and-run, Gen can't help but cling to the thread of hope, and, terrified of the violence seeking to catch up with her, she starts to try to track down her daughter.

This is a very tightly written thriller; McKenzie steers Geniver neatly down the show more line between compulsion and madness, between paranoia and reasonable fear. Like Geniver, the reader never knows whether her husband is involved or not, whose information she can trust, or whether Geniver is actually mad. The voice of a child weaves through the story, popping up intermittently, and remains a mystery until the end - enough to keep the reader looking for the next interruption. It reminded me a lot of Louise Douglas' The Secrets Between Us, although the characterisation is tighter and the mystery/madness angle more delicate than in TSBU.

In a sense, there is a little too much background information on the main characters: so much time and so many words are spent on Art's background, his rise to money and fame - it's clear that he is desperate to succeed at all costs. Similarly, we spend just a bit too time in Geniver's reproductive doldrums; as if a stillbirth wasn't traumatic enough, she hasn't fallen pregnant since and remains single-mindedly focussed on Beth, excluded from her friends' worlds of muddy football kit and birthday parties. In some ways, her exclusion from the world of a mother calls into question her suitability to take charge of a child, should Beth be found alive.

I'd figured out that the villain must be one of three people, given the assortment of red herrings, and was gratified to discover that one of them was the main villain, with a lot of help from a second one! There's a really chilling ending to this one, after the big climax/shoot-out/confrontation which we all knew was coming, which I didn't expect and which ends the reading experience with quite a cold, brutal feeling - as if the rest of the book wasn't brutal enough!

A well-paced, enthralling debut - I look forward to more of McKenzie's work. show less

Crafted with delicate intricacy and fast-moving action, the only book I've ever read that caused my daughter to ask, "Do you love that book more than me?" because of its ability to keep my attention no matter what was going on around me.

Gen thinks her only child was born dead, but eight years later a stranger appears at her doorstep to inform her the child was not only alive, but her husband was involved in fabricating the alleged death and whisking the baby away.

For two intense weeks, Gen follows up on the lead with the help of her husband's former best friend, Lorcan. The closer the pair delve to the truth, the more their worlds unravel.

With a haunting ending that you will always remember, this is definitely a book I wish I had written.

** spoiler alert ** Geniver and Art's baby, Beth, was stillborn eight years ago, but one day a woman comes to the door and tells Gen that her sister was the nurse who assisted at the C-section and, before dying, she confided that the baby had been born alive and that Art knew this to be the case. I enjoyed the first half of this book very much, although it was a little slow to get going. While Gen is trying to work out how much to believe and does some amateur sleuthing with Lorcan, the story was a page-turner, but the last few chapters covering the last few hours and containing the "big reveal" were all a bit much. The body count alone was ridiculous, and don't get me started on the whole incestuous relationship/abortion/infertility show more storyline.

The fact that it was Morgan who had the missing child I worked out just before it was revealed (always a good feeling!) but Art's motivations were unconvincing. The author left them intentionally murky, or perhaps mixed, but they never seemed compelling enough to me. Art's character was a mystery to me - his lies took Gen in so completely for so many years, when she questioned him about her growing suspicions he remained calm and maintained the story, and yet we are told that he loved Gen so much that he did all this for her to protect her from Morgan...? I could not work out where his allegiances truly lay. I also had issues with the basic premises - did Ed's school believe Morgan and Art to be his parents? I know the idea was that Morgan believed money could get you anything, but they must have some major document-forger criminal associates.

The final pages from Ed's perspective were chilling and actually a lot more realistic than Gen's seeming belief that she can be a mother to him and that everything will be OK in the end. show less

Eight years ago, Gen went for a check up at the hospital at 37 weeks pregnant only to be told that the baby no longer had a heartbeat and had passed away in utero. She was given an emergency C-section to deliver the baby, a little girl that she and her husband Art named Beth.

Since they lost Beth, Gen has checked out. Art has worked at building his business, his reputation, making money. Gen, who had published three novels previously hasn’t written anything since Beth died. She teaches a few writing a week at a college but she can’t find any joy or satisfaction. They’ve been through 6 attempts at IVF and it’s failed every single time. It seems like Beth may have been her one and only chance to be a mother.

Then a woman knocks on show more her door and tells her that her baby had been born alive. The delivering obstetrician, the anesthetist, the midwife present in the theatre were all in on it. Somewhere, her baby is out there… waiting for her. Why would anyone do this?

Gen doesn’t know what to think, what to believe, who to trust. This woman sounds genuine and Gen is sure that she absolutely 100% believes what she is saying. She confides in Art, who immediately tells her that it couldn’t be possible, that he Then the woman tells Gen that Art was in on it, that her own husband is aware of what really happened that day and all of a sudden Gen feels like she can trust no one. Are they trying to make her believe she is crazy?

But what if she’s not? What if it’s really true and her baby is really out there?

I am not a writer but I think it must be really hard to write a great ending to a story. The ending here is pure genius! show less