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EYES WIDE OPEN
by Andrew Gross
William Morrow, July 2011
352 pages
$25.99
ISBN: 0061655961


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Don't start reading EYES WIDE OPEN by Andrew Gross unless you have a lot of reading time ahead. It quickly becomes one of those books that you cannot put down. Gross has written a thriller inspired by the tragic death of his nephew, yet the fictional story he creates goes far beyond that event. You will experience a sense of looming menace and almost supernatural evil as this tale unfolds. Gross is able to paint very sympathetic portraits of his characters in just a few pages, so when they die or are threatened we care about them.

A killer cult loosely based on Charles Manson and his "family" seems to be on the loose many decades after their horrific crimes were committed and everyone responsible was incarcerated. Is the connection real, even though their Svengali-like leader Houvnanian is still imprisoned? At first, there are no apparent murders, but then deaths that go back many decades are found to be not what they had appeared to be. All of these possible murders have something to do with Charles Erlich and his wife Gabby, whose son Evan throws himself off a rock into the Pacific in the middle of the night. Evan had been struggling with mental illness and had talked of suicide, so the police were quick to reach the conclusion that he did kill himself when he walked out of a halfway house and never returned. His parents, however, are not willing to believe this, and try to find out the truth.

Jay Erlich narrates the thriller. He is Charles's successful younger brother, a well off vascular surgeon with a thriving and demanding New York practice. Jay has spent his adult life bailing out his older brother whose life has been affected by bipolar disease and drugs. A sometime musician, Charles now lives on welfare, barely getting by. Jay drops everything to fly out to California to help out after his nephew's death. He becomes drawn into his brother's quest to find out what really happened to his son. People keep telling Jay to leave the case alone and go back home, and his wife becomes more and more distraught as he continues to investigate the death, but he cannot leave as the odd and frightening clues begin to add up to something even more shocking. What he discovers about this death and the secrets that his brother has been harboring about his past create a level of suspense that does not end until the book does. Actually, the horrors of the past revisited on the present do not even end with that, but you will have to read the book to find out exactly how this all transpires.

Anne Corey is a writer, poet, teacher and botanical artist in New York's Hudson Valley.

Reviewed by Anne Corey, May 2011

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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