Shut Your Eyes Tight (2011) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Characters/People edit see section history

• Dave Gurney: Retired New York Police Department detective that has been asked to look at the 4 month old Ashton murder case.
• Jack Hardwick: New York State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation Police Detective who asked Dave Gurney to look at the murder Ashton murder case
• Scott Ashton: Groom of the murder victim, Jillian Perry Ashton
• Madeleine Gurney: Dave's wife, a very clever and intuitive lady. She loves the simple life, the beauty of nature, and wants Dave to distance himself from the gritty world he inhabited as a homicide detective.
• Hector Flores: Mexican gardener employed by and befriended by Scott Ashton
• Sheridan Kline: District Attorney for the city of New York
• Jillian Perry: Bride of Scott Ashton and murder victim
• Wigg: Add a description of this character.
• Rodriguez: NY State Bureau of Criminal Investigation Chief
• Blatt: NY State Bureau of Investigation detective who took over the Ashton murder investigation
• Val Perry: Mother of the murdered bride, Jillian Perry.
• Sonya
• Anderson: Lieutenant at New York State Bureau of Criminal Investigation
• Darryl Becker
• Kiki Muller: Wife of Ashton's neighbor, Carl Muller.
• Luntz: Chief of Police at Tambury where the Ashton murder took place. He and his wife Carol were guests at the wedding.
• Giotto Skard
• Carl Muller: Slightly nutty husband of Kiki and neighbor of Scott Ashton
• Jay Jykynstyl: An extremely wealthy and mysterious art collector.
• George: Neighbor and less wealthy neighbor of Scott Ashton
• Peggy Meeker: friend of Dave Gurney's wife. Married to a professor known as "Spider Man".
• Alessandro: Photographer
• Edward Vallory: Signature on suspicions text messages received by Scott Ashton and the murder victim
• Kyle: Dave Gurney's adult son from his fist marriage
• Harlen
• Melanie Strum
• Leonardo
• Marian Eliot

Quotes edit see section history

• “But there’s a funny thing about a crystal-clear image of the way you ought to live. If you don’t actively hang on to it every day, the vision rapidly fades. A moment of grace is only a moment of grace. Unembraced, it soon becomes a kind of ghost, a pale retinal image receding out of reach like the memory of a dream, receding until it becomes eventually no more than a discordant note in the undertone of your life.”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• If the facts contradict each other, it means that some of them aren’t facts.

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• The perils that strike the greatest terror in us are not those which have been spelled out but those that our imaginations conjure. We are chilled to the bone not by the lengthy rants of an angry man but by the menace in a placid voice.

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• “A therapist once told me that an expectation is nothing but a resentment waiting to be born.”

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• procrastination was nothing but a short-term escape that creates a long-term problem—that it just occupies more and more storage space in the brain, creating more and more discomfort. Intellectually, there was no argument. Intellectually, he knew that most of the misery in his life arose from the avoidance of discomfort.

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• There’s tremendous believability to facts a person thinks he’s discovered. When your target believes that he knows things about you that you didn’t want him to know, those things will seem doubly true to him. When he thinks he’s penetrated below your surface layer, what he uncovers in that deeper layer he’ll see as the real truth. That’s what I call the eureka fallacy. It’s that peculiar trick of the mind that gives total credibility to what you think you’ve discovered on your own.”

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• “The stories people tell you about themselves seem to retain the possibility of being false. But what you discover about them by yourself seems to be the truth.

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• But there’s a funny thing about a crystal-clear image of the way you ought to live. If you don’t actively hang on to it every day, the vision rapidly fades. A moment of grace is only a moment of grace. Unembraced, it soon becomes a kind of ghost, a pale retinal image receding out of reach like the memory of a dream, receding until it becomes eventually no more than a discordant note in the undertone of your life.

  Highlighted by 14 Kindle customers

• grief, he’d discovered, was not an experience you went through once and then “moved on” (as the idiotic popular phrase would have it). The truth was that it came over you in successive waves—waves separated by periods of numbness, periods of forgetfulness, periods of ordinary living.

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• What we’re able to imagine is always worse than what reality places before us. The greatest fear by far is the fear of what we imagine is lurking in the dark.

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• Blatt embodied an attitude Gurney’s favorite college professor long ago had described as “ignorance armed and ready for battle.”

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Karnala Fashion
• Tambury
• New York
• Manhattan
• Albany
• Higgles Road

Organizations edit see section history

• New York Police Department (NYPD): Add a description of this organization.

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

Preceded by Think of a Number, and followed by Let the Devil Sleep.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. John Verdon (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 813.6

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Mystery & Thrillers › Thrillers
• Books › Literature & Fiction