A novel about a farm murder

Close Your Eyes by Michael Robotham
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Clinical psychologist Joseph O'Loughlin is asked to help with the investigation into a farm murder near Clevedon, Somerset, where a woman and her teenage daughter are murdered.

The investigation is complicated by there being too many suspects, many of whom are hiding at least some of what they did on the day of the murder. O'Loughlin's estranged wife Julianne has to go into hospital for an operation, and calls on him to return to their cottage to look after their daughters in her absence. The elder daughter Charlie has finished school and wants to follow in her father's footsteps by studying psychology, and offers to drive him around.

## spoiler alert ##

If you haven't read this book and might want to, be aware that there may be spoilers in what follows.

I might have given the book four stars on GoodReads, were it not for what struck me as a rather large plot hole. 

Charlie O'Laoughlin, accompanying her father as a driver, looks at sketches made by the murdered girl, Harper Crowe, on the day of her death, one of a house, and one of an old man, and finds a clue to what she was doing that day, as the sketches are dated. But the clue turns out to be a plot hole that bothered me so much that after finishing the book I had to go and reread parts of the book to find out why it bothered me.

Charlie meets the killer three times, yet apparently does not remember him at all from the previous meetings.

The first occasion is when she takes it upon herself to ask people she meets whether they recognise the place or people in the sketches. One of the people she asks is the killer, who recognises the old man as his father, and the house as the nursing home where he stays. He tries to take the sketches from Charlie, who runs and locks herself in the car. The killer breaks a window of the car, but runs away when it seems there is another witness. The incident is reported to the police, who give it a case number.

The second time Charlie meets the killer is when she goes to the nursing home and identifies the building in the sketch. The killer confronts her in the garden of the nursing home while she is watched (from a distance) by retired detective Vincent Ruiz, who accompanied her as her protector after the previous attempt to take the sketches. Charlie apparently does not recognise the killer, which means she must be remarkably unobservant. She says nothing about it to Ruiz, nor to the police, not even to say that he was the man who broke the car window.

The third time she meets the killer at the beach, where she is with her little sister. He again tries to get the sketches off her, and again she does not seem to recognise him from the two previous meetings, but seems to meekly acquiesce in her own and her sister's abduction. Her behaviour seems most peculiar, but is not explained or even questioned.

Perhaps I'm missing something here, but if I am, I hope someone will be able to explain it to me.

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