Stephanie Jones: Book Review - Close Your Eyes by Michael Robotham

An audience with Australian crime writer Michael Robotham is a treat. During his recent countrywide tour to promote his new book in the Joe O’Loughlin series, Close Your Eyes, he spent more than an hour on a rainy Tuesday night spellbinding an Auckland crowd with stories of the real-life inspiration for his clinical psychologist protagonist, how he segued from celebrity memoir ghostwriting to crime fiction, his hobbies (writing), and what he does on holiday (more writing).

Indeed, it’s only recently that Robotham’s been able to pack up for the day at around 6:30pm and not return to write some more after dinner, though unlike his friend Val McDermid, who tells him that her characters stay in her office when she closes the door, his follow him wherever he goes.

That’s not surprising when you consider what they’re getting up to. After 2014’s energetic Life or Death, a standalone piece about a man who escapes from prison the day before he is due to be released, Robotham revives the travails of Joe O’Loughlin, a good man dealing with bad things. Some years ago he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and the shock of the news prompted the briefest of flings which in turn precipitated the demise of his marriage.

Joe’s six-year estrangement from wife Julianne, with whom he remains in love, is a source of considerable pain to him, though they maintain a friendship as they raise daughters Charlie and Emma. Hope of reconciliation is sparked when she invites Joe to spend the summer with them.

True to his motto to “make them care”, Robotham thickens Close Your Eyes with the emotional consequences of professional and familial ties. Psychologists of Joe’s type are called in to crime scenes that are outside the norm, and so he is summoned by long-time acquaintance Detective Chief Superintendent Ronnie Cray to enlighten the investigators working a case in North Somerset: a 43-year-old woman and her teenage daughter have been found murdered in their farmhouse, each by different methods. (Robotham takes a real incident as his starting point for each novel, and Close Your Eyes is inspired by the still-unsolved 1995 murder of Janet Brown in Buckinghamshire.)

The list of suspects is substantial and motives are plenty, and Joe’s role becomes more prominent when one of his former students, a self-styled ‘Mindhunter’, elbows his way into the investigation and reveals confidential information to the media.

The perp’s psychological make-up and MO offer plenty of thrills to those who enjoy their crime fiction on the bloodier side, but the real satisfaction of Close Your Eyes lies, as ever, in the rich intellectual and emotional life of Joe O’Loughlin.

This installment finds him in a ruminative state – touring a university with his elder daughter, he reflects on how student protesting has shifted from anti-apartheid activism in his day to limp objections to Starbucks’ UK tax exemption – and a self-conscious one. He is aware of the intimidating barrier of his Parkinson’s “mask” (“the blankness of my face can look almost spectral”) and of his own shortcomings: “I’m never quite sure when to call someone a friend. I have so few of them.”

Sadness abounds? Somewhat, but the conclusion of Close Your Eyes finds Joe looking to the future and embracing his family more closely than ever. Somewhere out there, another lunatic awaits.