Paula Daly
Haven’t we all wanted to pretend everything’s perfectly fine? Jane Campbell avoids confrontation at all costs. Given the choice, she’ll always let her husband, Leon―a bestselling thriller author―fight their battles. She’d prefer to focus on the good things in life: precious days with her two young children, a steady and loving marriage, their mischievously playful cat Bonita, and her fulfilling job as a creative writing teacher. In Jane’s eyes, life is altogether sweeter than any individual bump in the road.
But when Leon suffers a brutal attack in the driveway of their home, in front of their children, Jane has to finally face reality. Who would commit such a hateful offense in broad daylight? Leon has imagined his fair share of crime on the page, and now this unthinkable violence has landed on the Campbell family doorstep. With her husband in a coma, Jane must open her eyes to the problems in her life, as well as the secrets that have been kept from her. Although she might not like what she sees, if she’s committed to discovering who hurt her husband―and why―Jane needs to take matters into her own hands.
A surprising and gripping thriller of literary ambition and envy, from acclaimed novelist Paula Daly, Open Your Eyes exposes an ordinary suburban family to a shocking act of revenge that irreparably changes their lives.
Grove Press
Grove Atlantic
October 9, 2018
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In The Galway Silence
Ken Bruen
Ken Bruen has been called “hard to resist, with his aching Irish heart, silvery tongue, and bleak noir sensibility” (New York Times Book Review). His prose is as characteristically sharp as his outlook in the latest Jack Taylor novel, In the Galway Silence.
After much tragedy and violence, Jack Taylor has at long last landed at contentment. Of course, he still knocks back too much Jameson and dabbles in uppers, but he has a new woman in his life, a freshly bought apartment, and little sign of trouble on the horizon. Once again, trouble comes to him, this time in the form of a wealthy Frenchman who wants Jack to investigate the double-murder of his twin sons. Jack is meanwhile roped into looking after his girlfriend’s nine-year-old son, and is in for a shock with the appearance of a character out of his past. The plot is one big chess game and all of the pieces seem to be moving at the behest of one dangerously mysterious player: a vigilante called “Silence,” because he’s the last thing his victims will ever hear.
This is Ken Bruen at his most darkly humorous, his most lovably bleak, as he shows us the meaning behind a proverb of his own design―“the Irish can abide almost anything save silence.”
The Mysterious Press
Grove Atlantic
November 6, 2018