The Shut Eye by Belinda Bauer

Published in Great Britian in 2015; published by Grove Press on January 12, 2016

DCI John Marvel might not live up to his name in all respects but he has an impressive ability to solve murders, thanks to hard work, determination, intuition, and attention to detail. On the other hand, even the colleagues who admire Marvel -- and there are only a handful -- agree that he is abrasive, rude, and generally unsuited to human interaction. That makes him a fun character, although a bad husband.

Marvel begins The Shut Eye by fretting about a cold case, a girl named Edie who went missing and is presumed dead. Soon he’s assigned to look for a missing dog, a project that does not make him happy.

In a closely related plotline, a boy named Danny has been missing for four months. The boy’s mother, Anna Buck, blames her husband for leaving the door unlocked and blames herself for not immediately noticing his absence. In Anna’s desperate desire to be reunited with Danny, she turns to a psychic, who made fruitless attempts to help the police recover Edie. The psychic purports to be a shut eye (a true psychic) as opposed to an open eye (a fraud) -- hence the novel’s title. Did I mention that the psychic specializes in communicating with lost dogs?

When Anna begins to have visions, Marvel isn’t sure what to believe. Anna’s mental health is shaky -- she is, in Marvel’s words, “mad as a bucket of frogs.” Can Marvel bring himself to rely on the paranormal instead of the real-world evidence that usually drives his investigations? Should the reader accept psychic phenomena at face value, or is there more to the story?

A couple of well-developed minor characters add depth to the story, including a Cambodian who fled his country to avoid shame and is living in England illegally. Also playing a significant role is a black female police officer who has been given a prominent position at the front desk so the police can show her off to the public, a decided waste of her intelligence and talent.

Belinda Bauer milks humor from the psychic and the missing dog, but also from Marvel, who suspects that his computer is being lazy when it can’t answer a question. Marvel has zero insight into why his wife is upset when he spreads autopsy photographs across the table during dinner. He’s the kind of guy who is likable in fiction even though you would dread knowing him in the real world.

Despite its undertones of humor, however, The Shut Eye is a serious crime novel. I don’t usually like stories that end as this one does -- I’m not sure it even makes sense -- but I’m giving The Shut Eye’s resolution a pass because it was, in a key respect, unexpectedly clever. I’m also recommending the novel because I enjoyed its suspense and liked the characters.

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