Story for the Week
Where do you go (or what do you do) when you want to escape reality?
If I were a Sim (and wouldn’t that be amazing?), I might crawl into my bed and cry it out. I could build a barn and pet my llama (and that is not a euphemism for anything). I could plan a get together, go on a date, watch a movie alone or with a friend. Maybe I would use my motherlode cheat code to pad my bank account. 🤔 Heck…I could even play The Sims. 🤭 I could also…wait for it…read a book!
Sim Me lives in a fake reality, so escaping reality isn’t hard. Can Sim Me go to college classes? (Yes, if they’re a young adult.) Sim Me can choose a regular job or do odd jobs, but if they don’t want to work, they can waste every day away. Sure the bills still arrive in the mail every three days, but there’s a magical cheat code when the money runs out. Like I said, being a Sim would be amazing.
On the flip side, Sim Me could get struck by lightning running home in the rain, be electrocuted, and die, so there’s that. (Noooooo…I’ve never seen that happen before. Ok, yes, I have, but it happened to Sim Corinne. 🤫) Sim Me could be tortured by a gamer who decides to trap me in a room by taking the door off and letting me starve to death. Or Sim Me can be prevented from going to the bathroom and end up being embarrassed when I wet myself and have to clean up my own pee off the floor. (Noooooo…I’ve never been that gamer. Ok, yes, I have. 🤭)
But the real me has real life to deal with. Real life doesn’t have a motherlode cheat when the bills are due. I can’t just open my refrigerator and choose something to cook and all the ingredients are magically there. There’s no magic potion that I can buy from the store that will satisfy all my needs at once (hygiene, bathroom, social, energy, fun).
So how do I escape reality? I go for a massage every month and give myself 80 minutes to be pampered with no interruptions. I play The Sims. I watch television, although I miss watching with Corinne…two months down, one to go before she comes home from Liverpool (What Will I Binge Watch Without Her?). And of course, I read…a lot. Focusing my brain on a fictional world with fictional people in fictional situations? That’s the greatest escape for me.
I’m guessing it’s a great escape for a lot of people. When I read on my Kindle, I highlight key plot points and character descriptions for my reviews. Occasionally, I highlight passages that feel meaningful. One of the great things about a Kindle is, when I highlight a passage, it will tell me how many other readers highlighted that passage. Usually, it’s fewer than ten, maybe 20 tops.
But the book reviewed below incudes a character who talks about using books as an escape, and 118 other readers highlighted the same passage. “I do this a lot. Climb into a book when I don’t like what’s going on in the real world.” Me too, Olivia. Me too.
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐
3 Stars for Close Your Eyes by Teresa Driscoll
335 pages
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Publication Date: January 1, 2025
This title was an Amazon First Reads selection.
Publisher’s Description
Finding missing children is Matthew’s job—but this time it’s his own daughter who’s disappeared.
When private investigator Matthew Hill picks up the call from his wife, Sally, his world comes crashing down. Their eight-year-old daughter, Amelie, is missing. One second, she was there, the next, she was gone.
It’s the very nightmare they’ve been dreading. Long ago, Matthew left the force after a woman blamed him for her son’s death, promising that he too would one day feel her pain. It’s a threat that’s hung over his family ever since, and now it’s Amelie’s picture on the news.
Matthew knows how these things go—the longer their daughter is missing, the less hope there is of finding her alive.
As the clock ticks and a canal is searched, he and Sally must reckon with their greatest fear…
************
Main Characters:
- Matthew Hill – former police investigator in Devon turned private investigator, recently agreed to rejoin the police force
- Sally Hill – Matthew’s wife, mom to eight-year-old Amelie, met Matthew when he was helping her and a boarding school friend find a third friend
- Melanie Sanders – newly appointed head of CID in Cornwall, worked with Matthew in Devon while he was on the force and recently convinced him to rejoin, she and her husband Tom and son George regularly have dinner with the Hills
- Dawn and Adam Meadows – grieving parents whose son tragically died years ago while Matthew chased him after he stole from a local store, Dawn blames Matthew for her son’s death
- Olivia Miles – 19-year-old single mother to five-year-old Chloe, wanted to hire Matthew to help her find her mother who left her and her father when Olivia was a child, Matthew cuts their first meeting short when he gets the call about Amelie going missing
I was excited to see the latest Teresa Driscoll book on Amazon’s First Reads list. Driscoll writes solid story lines with twists that you don’t typically see coming, and Close Your Eyes holds true to that style. That said, I think it could have been at least a 4-star read but didn’t quite do it for me.
Matthew Hill is a recurring character for Driscoll. I first encountered him in The Promise (“Three May Keep a Secret, If Two of Them are Dead”) when one of the characters in that book hired him as a private investigator. He briefly appeared in I Will Make You Pay (Do You Stick to a Schedule?). This story is all Matthew and Sally.
The book starts with Sally and her daughter Amelie at a mall. Amelie wants to try on a green dress, but they are running late and Sally tells her no. When Sally steps outside of a shop for a better cell signal to make a call, instructing Amelie to wait for her inside, she stays on the phone way longer than the few minutes she thinks she’s on the phone. By the time Sally goes back inside for Amelie, the eight-year-old is nowhere to be found. When Sally realizes that Amelie truly is missing and calls Matthew, he cuts short a meeting with Olivia, who wants to hire him to find her mother.
Chapters alternate between Sally, Matthew, and Melanie (Matthew’s former partner on the police force). Each chapter identifies the day because the first 48 hours are critical when it comes to finding a missing person safe. Chapters are relatively short so the pace feels frenetic and chaotic, as you would think the beginning of a missing person investigation would be. Melanie skips a vacation with her husband and son to lead the investigation. As a former police investigator on the verge of returning to the force, Matthew desperately wants to help and struggles to step aside. Sally is distraught and can’t decide whether she is more to blame than Matthew whose return to police work is public and controversial.
We learn a lot of Matthew’s history in the first half of the book—why he left the police force to begin with and the risk he might be taking by coming back. Matthew and Melanie both keep secrets they shouldn’t that threaten to derail the investigation. I spent the whole first half of the book wanting to discover why Amelie was taken, what the tie was to Matthew’s past, would they find her in time. As part two begins, Olivia gets her own chapters written in the first person added to the other three characters.
So how did this fall below a 4-star read? Driscoll’s writing style in this particular novel struck me as being extremely choppy, more so than her previous novels. There has always been some element of this in her writing, but this book has a overabundance of distracting fragmented sentences.
- “The male police officer quickly steps away to talk on his radio. Face grave. His expression once again sends cold shooting through Sal. She shivers and the doctor says she will stay for a few more minutes to make sure she’s OK but will need to leave then. On shift at the hospital.”
- “You can’t be involved, Matt. Not directly. Not out there. With the official police inquiry. You’re the parent and I get that you’re going through hell. But I promised them I won’t let you up close. Interfere.”
- “She looks at her phone and thinks of Matthew. She wants to know if Amelie was wearing her hair in a ponytail when she disappeared but she daren’t ask. Daren’t ring. Matthew will want to know why she’s asking. Will guess.”
Another style element I found honestly annoying was the author’s habit of repeatedly calling Matthew, Dawn, and Adam by their full names: Matthew Hill (50 times), Dawn Meadows (64 times), Adam Meadows (33 times). I can understand occasionally if you’re referencing them on the news or talking about them in a new situation. But Sally and Melanie are only addressed by their first names the vast majority of the time—by their full names three times and seven times, respectively. It’s just jarring to constantly read “Matthew Hill,” “Dawn Meadows,” “Adam Meadows.”
Finally let’s get to why and how Amelie disappeared.
***SPOILERS*** SPOILERS***SPOILERS***
So what happened to Amelie? While Sally was outside the store on the phone, Amelie snuck to the back of the store and tried on the green dress. But somehow she goes out the back door of the store. She’s eight. Why would she go out the back door?
She is abducted by Olivia’s father who turns out to be clearly mentally ill. He worries about keeping Olivia and her daughter Chloe safe, so he tracks Olivia and snoops in her phone and discovers she is meeting with Matthew. He researches Matthew’s family and then just happens to see Amelie while Olivia and Matthew are meeting at Matthew’s office. He thinks she resembles Olivia at the same age, and God tells him that he needs to keep Amelie safe. So he makes up a story about her mother being sick and he needs to take care of her until her mother is well. Amelie, being only eight years old, believes him (this is important). He has chloroform that he originally bought to get Olivia home but uses it on Amelie and carries her to his car.
When Olivia arrives home, her father takes the three girls to a caravan in another county and falls deeper and deeper into his schizophrenic delusions. God has told him that they need to fast, so he prevents them from eating. He locks the girls in a bedroom, and when Olivia tries to figure out how they will escape, he gets angry and marches Amelie outside. Olivia hears two gunshots and her father comes back alone, so she presumes that Amelie is dead even though her father says Amelie ran away. When they are finally found, Olivia’s father is shot and arrested, and Olivia tells the police about the gunshots but that they didn’t see what happened to Amelie.
The very next chapter is Olivia talking about her father’s trial and how the police found her mother, her former best friend, and Chloe’s father buried under the porch of the caravan. Her father had murdered them all.
The Epilogue takes place eight years later, so Amelie is 16. The Hills live in France but are planning to move back to Devon because Amelie wants to spend her last year of school there. She has confided in Melanie that she wants to go into police investigation but has to figure out how to tell Matthew. She also tells us how she happened to survive, which is why I mentioned the importance of her being only eight and believing Olivia’s father when she was abducted.
She explains how seeing Matthew run toward danger when she was young saved her. When Olivia’s father took her into the woods, he told her to run. It occurred to her that he planned to shoot her in the back as she ran away. She thought of her father running toward danger, and she defied Olivia’s father who was taken aback, didn’t shoot her, and chose instead to put her in the trunk of his car. She was eight! I find it extremely hard to believe that an eight-year-old would realize that her mentally ill, erratic abductor was planning to shoot her as she ran away.
I feel like this book had a ton of potential in the first part, but the second part just kind of unraveled. If you’re a Teresa Driscoll fan, you might still enjoy this. It was an ok read for me.
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