One of the best books I’ve read lately.

The Shut Eye (2016) is unpredictable. The characters three dimensional and fascinating.

Belinda Bauer spent seven years as a screenwriter before writing her first novel at age 45.

She really knows how to make a story come to life.

DCI John Marvel is an asshole — but a relentless and successful murder investigator.

The plot follows two parallel investigations that eventually collide: the personal quest of a grieving mother and the professional obsession of a cynical detective ➙ Marvel haunted that he never solved the disappearance of a 12-year-old girl.

Anna Buck, whose four-year-old son, Daniel, vanished from their home after her husband, James, accidentally left the front door open.

Anna is suicidal and going mentally ill after 4 months.

Desperate for answers that the police cannot provide, Anna turns to Richard Latham, a psychic known as a “shut eye”—someone who genuinely believes they have supernatural abilities. This decision strains her already fractured marriage and leads her to believe she is experiencing her own psychic visions

The “Shut Eye”: In psychic argot, this refers to a person who genuinely believes in their own psychic powers, distinguishing them from “open eyes” who are deliberate frauds.

Great book — but I was confused by the ending. You could call it unresolved.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Author Freida McFadden is SUPER popular these days.

The Surrogate Mother (2018) is one of the best I’ve read.

It follows the characteristic “McFadden style” with short, bingeable chapters and multiple high-stakes plot twists.

Plot Overview

The story centers on Abby Adler, a woman who has spent years and a fortune on failed infertility treatments and a heartbreaking adoption attempt that fell through at the last moment. Her life seems to turn around when her personal assistant, Monica, makes a seemingly selfless offer to act as her surrogate.

Suspicious Ties: Abby begins to notice strange connections between Monica and her husband, Sam.

Sony Pictures acquired the film adaptation rights to Freida McFadden’s psychological thriller, The Surrogate Mother, in December 2025.

Button Man (2018) is a historical thriller by Andrew Gross.

I should read more historical fiction. This book is very good.

The novel is a departure from his early contemporary “suburban thrillers” and is based partly on his own family history in New York City’s garment industry. 

Plot Summary

The story follows three brothers—Morris, Sol, and Harry Rabishevsky—growing up in poverty on New York’s Lower East Side in the 1920s and 1930s. 

• Morris: The driven youngest brother, he apprentices in a clothing factory at age twelve and eventually builds a successful garment business, Raab Brothers, with Sol.
• Sol: The bookish brother who becomes an accountant and manages the business’s finances.
• Harry: The troubled middle brother who falls into the world of organized crime, eventually working as a “button man” (hitman or enforcer) for the notorious mobster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter. 

The brothers’ lives collide when Buchalter and the Jewish mob—including real historical figures like Dutch Schultz and Jacob Shapiro—attempt to take over the garment unions through violent shakedowns.

Morris must decide whether to yield to the mob’s demands or risk everything by assisting Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey in bringing them down.

Mick Herron is the author of the Slough House series, early novels of which have been adapted into the Slow Horses television series.

Critics praise his witty one-liners, “barbed and sardonic” dialogue, and elegant descriptive passages.

All true. Very funny. Skillful.

But the guy is an awful story teller. His books drag. Are repetitious. Nothing happens aside from witty banter for multiple chapters.

The TV adaptations are WAY better than his books.

HIs 2008 stand alone novel Reconstruction is a good example.

Brilliant in many ways. But confusing and ultimately disappointing for this reader.