Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2)

Starred review from May 9, 2011
Verdon follows Think of a Number, his sensational debut featuring retired NYPD detective Dave Gurney, with this standout sequel, set a year later. A bizarre, high-profile murder near Gurney's Catskills home puts his already shaky marriage to the test. Four months earlier, "controversial hotshot psychiatrist" Scott Ashton went looking for his spoiled rich-girl bride, Jillian Perry, after he noticed she was missing from their wedding reception at his lavish estate. Ashton discovered her decapitated body sitting in a chair, with her head posed on a table, in the gardener's cottage. The police, who found a machete covered with the victim's blood in the nearby woods, are sure the killer is Ashton's trusted Mexican gardener, Hector Flores, who disappeared after the brutal crime. Perry's eccentric mother, who's unsparing in recounting her daughter's emotional problems, gives Gurney a blank check to locate Flores. Verdon tosses in an apparent impossibility involving the murder weapon, and once again sensitively depicts a relationship in crisis.

February 15, 2011

Having made good on his first outing, Think of a Number (a USA Today best seller sold to 20 countries), Dave Guerney returns to fight crime again. He wanted to retire, but not a chance: a bride has been gruesomely murdered at her own wedding. Now things are getting murderous with his wife, too. Mystery readers should definitely consider.

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