CLOSE YOUR EYES

By Michael Robotham Sphere, 400 pages, $32.99

Joe O’Loughlin has Parkinson’s disease. O’Loughlin is a clinical psychologist who consults for the police on murder cases in his West England home territory. In his mid-50s, he got his Parkinson’s diagnosis 10 years earlier, but aside from tremors in his left hand and a lot of angst about his future, he isn’t yet crippled by the disease. That’s a break for O’Loughlin, because the case presented to him by the coppers in Close Your Eyes seems not just fiendish but endlessly intricate.

The new book is the ninth in the O’Loughlin series, beautifully written by Robotham, who has shaped O’Loughlin into an attractive character, a psychologist who may be the most pushy interrogator in the crime-solving business. O’Loughlin doesn’t hesitate to approach total strangers for the most intimate details of their lives. Sometimes his quizzing falls into a show-off Sherlock Holmes mode as he draws amazing conclusions from a subject’s observable quirks. More often, as O’Loughlin says, he simply seeks to understand “the contradictions and paradoxes, the layers of personality within each of us.”

In the new book, O’Loughlin is asked to track the man who murdered a woman and her teenage daughter in their remote farmhouse. The dead woman turns out to have had a series of creepy sexual encounters, and as the investigation into the two murders continues, it appears adultery is a theme linking several other attacks in the rural neighbourhood.

At the same time, O’Loughlin deals with charged issues in his own home. His marriage has been under stress in the series’ last few books. His two daughters need emotional support. And, as we need no reminding, O’Loughlin is never free of his struggle with Parkinson’s.