I have read several other books by Charlie Donlea and enjoyed them all so I was excited to receive a copy of this one to read and review. I will admit it reads a little chaotically (a couple of perspectives weren’t clearly labeled and didn’t have clear timelines) but overall I thought it was an appropriate way to tell such a chaotic story. Alex’s life changes forever when her parents and younger brother are brutally murdered and when police enter and find her in her parents room covered in blood and holding the gun they assume she did it. Deep in traumatic shock she can say nothing but they’re all dead and her “empty eyes” are photographed and the world decides instantly on her guilt. This story is about that aftermath but also about her life and the mystery of why her family was murdered. Altogether this was a fun mystery/thriller that I pretty much read in one sitting because I needed to know what happened next.

This book captured my attention right away as I found the plot super intriguing. I got a little confused by all the different characters and a couple different story lines midway through, but they were tied together nicely by the end. Overall I really liked this book and will recommend it.

Charlie Donlea has crafted a complex novel of crime and sleuthing with plenty of suspense in his latest standalone novel, Those Empty Eyes . It features Alex Armstrong who has legally changed her name in addition to changing her appearance and backstory. Ten years ago, she was the traumatized teenager, Alexandra Quinlan. Alexandra was accused of killing her family and was led from the family home in handcuffs. The media nicknamed her “Empty Eyes”. With the help of lawyers, she fought to clear her name and won a defamation lawsuit.

Despite ten years passing, Alex continues to search for answers about her family’s murders. She’s now a legal investigator for the law firm that helped her clear her name. She works to investigate potential clients and to secure justice for clients. Her next case is Matthew Claymore, a college student, who’s being questioned by the police in the disappearance of his girlfriend, Laura McAllister. As Alex investigates, she finds connections to her family’s murder.

Readers can easily root for Alex and hope she can succeed in life and in solving the murders of her family. She tirelessly seeks evidence to identify that killer and to support the legal firm’s clients’ claims of innocence. She’s organized and hard-working, but struggles for normalcy and balance in her life. There are numerous supporting characters that provide support, conflict, interest, and stability.

What a beginning! Donlea captured my interest with the first couple of paragraphs. The complicated and multi-layered plot moves back and forth in time and shifts focus to incidents that feel very disconnected. This affected the pacing and distracted me at times, but the author managed to weave the threads and connect the dots into a suspenseful and shocking tale as the story progressed.

The author is a superb storyteller and manages to surprise readers as the reveal occurs. I felt for Alex throughout the novel and wanted her to succeed. But what really happens? I had suspected part of the ending, but other parts were a bolt out of the blue. Themes include murder, friendship, family, survivor’s guilt, values, integrity, ill treatment of minors, and much more.

Overall, this compelling story grabbed my attention with likeable characters, a harrowing escape, and multiple mysteries. Great characterization, plenty of investigations, some suspenseful moments, and an action-packed ending make this a recommended book. I could easily see this book being the first in a series featuring Alex. I’m looking forward to reading more books by this author.

Kensington Books and Charlie Donlea provided a complimentary digital ARC of this novel via NetGalley. All opinions expressed in this review are my own. The publication date is currently set for March 28, 2023. This review was originally posted at Mystery and Suspense Magazine.

I absolutely LOVE Charlie Donlea, he is one of my favorite authors and I have read every single book.

I was so excited for Those Empty Eyes, this book was so good!

Alexandra Quinlan is the namesake for this books title. She is given the name "empty eyes" after her parents and brother are killed in their home and she is arrested for their murders.

She was cleared of all charges, and it is ten years later and she is still on the search for who did this to her family and what the motive is.

This is an excellent, well written multi-layered thriller that I absolutely LOVED.

Thank you Netgalley & Kensington Books for an eARC of Those Empty Eyes by Charlie Donlea! Being my first read by this author, I wasn't sure what to expect.

What's it about?
10 years following the massacre of her family and being exonerated for the crime, Alex is known by true-crime enthusiasts as "empty eyes." Although her name and appearance have changed, people haven't forgotten about her. She hasn't forgotten, either, and is still searching for answers about who killed her family - and why,

Working as an investigator, Alex finds herself linked to another crime that brings her back to that fateful night ten years ago. I'm going to leave my synopsis here because the original one gives quite a bit away regarding the plot and this one is SO good that I highly recommend going into it blindly.

I was confused mid-way because I was wondering just how on earth all of these various stories and plot points were going to come together. I was convinced that they weren't, and that there would be lots of plot holes for me to make assumptions on. Everything was wrapped up nicely, and the final chapter certainly gave me goosebumps. I came to love a few of the characters in this one and would love to see another with them in it.

I alternated between an ecopy and the audio of this book, and couldn't stop listening and reading once I started, This one's got LOTS of TWs, but needless to say Donlea has wowed me!

Days before her 17th birthday Alex’s parents and little brother are shot in their home in the night. Narrowing escaping death, Alex hides. But when police arrive and Alex is holding the gun she is arrested. Donna, the first officer on scene thinks something is off and calls in her husband Garrett to defend Alex. Now years later Alex trying to find the answers to her family’s murder uncovers more in the truth.

Donlea does an amazing job twisting this plot. I was hooked on the first chapter. we follow different characters that all intertwine together nicely in the end. I could see a follow up book with Alex again on another case!! One of my top reads this year for sure!! Thank you to Kensington books for this ARC

Charlie Donlea has masterfully and meticulously interwoven three storylines within the pages of the rollercoaster that is Those Empty Eyes. His writing style and renowned craftsmanship of a storyline is on full display as you begin reading this wonderfully brilliant thriller.

Alexandra (Alex) Quinlan is a 17 year-old girl who is awoken to a horrible event unfolding one late night in her home. She hears gunshots and is frightened as to what to do next. Her neighbor calls the police, and as her parents and 13 year-old brother lay butchered upstairs, she is escorted out of the home in handcuffs. As Alex is placed in the back of the squad car, a reporter snaps a picture and remarks on how ‘empty’ her eyes are. She is placed on trial for the murders of her family, and is dubbed ‘Empty Eyes’.

10 years have passed, and Alex is now a skilled investigator for the firm of Lancaster & Jordan, the firm who previously represented her. Alex finds herself investigating several clients of Lancaster & Jordan, and she thinks she may have found some connections to her family’s murders. As the storylines unfurl, everything begins to come together in this twist fully turning saga of Alexandra Quinlan.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Kensington Publishing for the ARC and the opportunity to review this amazing book, and provide my unbiased opinion. Thank you to Charlie Donlea for yet another wonderful read!

I have read and loved everything this author has written and I still can't understand why he is not bigger in the UK market!? I do what I can but my reach is small. Come on UK Publisher... step it up!
Anyway... in this, his latest offering, we meet Alex. Well kinda. She has reinvented herself. She is no longer the lone survivor of her family's massacre. No longer the accused, no longer the detained, no longer the victim, when she sued for defamation, and won. And no longer Empty Eyes - the name the media called her after that shot of her leaving the house in cuffs.
And she is determined to find out what really happened to her family...
At the same time, she has her own career as a legal investigator, a job where she tries to get justice for people like her. One such person is Matthew who is under suspicion for the disappearance of girlfriend Laura. Alex believes him and thinks the cops are "taking the easy path" and so takes his case on...
And so begins a dual story of Alex investigating and fighting not only for Matthew in the present, trying to find out what has happened to Laura, but also for herself in the past and what happened to her family.
Oooo this really piqued my interest when I saw the blurb. Not that I relied on that for me to choose the book to read, I am already sold on this author and will probably read his shopping list should he publish that! Seriously I just love his style of writing. It fits with my style of reading and what I want/need from a book. Good story. Tight plotting. Pacing which matches the narrative. Well fleshed out characters that are easy to connect with in some way - good or bad. No superfluous padding or waffle so it gets on with itself well. And an ending that both keeps me guessing all the way but also doesn't come out of left field and which leaves me satisfied. And he always ticks all these boxes for me.
I just need to say one thing before I close. This book has a lot going on, there are quite a few threads that run through. All of which get tidied by the end but you do have to have your wits about you and do a bit of a juggle at times. That said, I'm usually pants at multiple thread books but I found it all easy to follow...
My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

3.5 STARS - When 17-year-old Alexandra Quinlan is the only survivor of the brutal murder of her family, she becomes the main suspect and dubbed 'Empty Eyes' by the press. Told in different timelines, the book follows Alex's life away from the spotlight and her struggle to identify the person who murdered her family in cold blood.

This family murder storyline pulled me right ... but then Donlea begins to add a surprising number of subplots into the mix and things get a bit chaotic. These subplots felt distracting, underdeveloped, and seemed to come out of nowhere, making the story unnecessarily convoluted and much more complicated than it had to be.

Those Empty Eyes was a messier read than I had hoped for and falls into the 'good but not great' category of thrillers. I enjoyed seeing several strong female characters and there is good tension that kept me focused on the main plot, but I would have enjoyed the subplots more if they were better developed and introduced more smoothly into the main plot.

The main murder storyline was intriguing, and the twist was decent, but the convoluted feel of the book and the number of coincidences that readers are required to accept detracted from my overall enjoyment. That said, I have enjoyed Donlea's previous books and will look forward to reading what he is writing next.

Disclaimer: My sincere thanks to Kensington Books for my advanced digital copy via NetGalley which was provided in exchange for my honest review.

This book right here is a perfect example of a book not being for everyone. Most of my friends found this one to be mediocre at best so I waited to the very last minute to read my arc and I was dreading that it would put me in a book slump. Lucky for me, it did not put me in a slump, and I actually liked it quite a bit.

Alexandra Quinlan is an 18 year old girl, home asleep in her bed, when the unthinkable happens. She is awakened by a gun shot. Not just one but three gun shots to be exact. Her father, mother, and 13 year old brother have been gunned down and killed. Alexandra, now hiding behind a grandfather clock in the hallway, is never discovered by the perpetrator. When the police arrive they find Alexandra in shock, sitting at the foot of her parents bed, with the shotgun in her hands. The police believe she's guilty of killing her family. An image of the shocked young woman being led from her home in handcuffs has earned her the name, Empty Eyes.

Eventually, due to poor police work and a lacking investigation the charges on Alexandra are dropped. To the public though she is now a murderer that got away with the unthinkable. Not only that but after winning a defamation case she is awarded millions. Some think that money is undeserved.

Alexandra, however, is determined to find the true guilty party. Will her investigation lead her to the truth? You'll have to read this to find out!

When Donlea sat down to pen this novel he was certainly feeling ambitious. You have the main plot and many meandering sub-plots that seem unconnected but I assure you Donlea manages to weave them all together in the end. Now I admit that this is a little (a lot!) over the top, something I usually struggle with, but because I was enjoying the journey to find out the truth I didn't let it bother me this time. I really like Alexandra and I wanted to see her character arc come full circle. The ending offered up a couple of juicy surprises that were completely unexpected and don't you just love when that happens? I know I do! 4 stars!

Many thanks to NetGalley and Kensington Books for my complimentary copy.

Let me start off by saying that Charlie Donlea is one of my favorite authors for mystery/thriller books.

I did enjoy this book, but I think there were just too many subplots that were dropped into the book in random places, and they didn't make sense at first, but they did come together at the end of the book. I did like the twist at the end of the book.

My rating for this is 3.5 stars.

Thanks go out to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for letting me read and review this book.

Charlie Donlea wrote one of my all time favorite thrillers (Don’t Believe It) and since then has been an auto-read author for me. I don’t need to read the synopsis or know anything about it - I just need to read anything he writes! Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the free ebook of Those Empty Eyes to read and review.

This one started out SO STRONG for me. It opens with a court case - Alexandra Quinlan is suing the state of Virginia for defamation. Her parents and younger brother were killed and Alexandra was found holding the gun. The police initially believed she had committed the murders and the way things were handled made it impossible for Alexandra to return to school or any semblance of a normal life. The court case and flashbacks to what happened the night of the murder had me fully drawn in. But this was only a small portion of the book.

Then we jump to a year later. And then ten years after that. We move around to different side stories. By 40% into the book I felt like I had already read parts of 4 different books. All the stories come together - sort of - but there’s still something about the ending that doesn’t make sense to me.

SPOILER AHEAD - stop reading here if you don’t want to see it. I don’t understand how it was Garrett at Camp Montague. Wasn’t it Jacqueline’s brother Buck? It seemed all along to be set up that it was her brother. But also nothing was mentioned about Buck at all in the whole ending. I don’t understand.

This story definitely kept me reading and there were parts that I really enjoyed but ultimately it felt too clunky and forced. This wasn’t a favorite for me but I’m still excited to read whatever Donlea writes next.

This was my first Charlie Donlea book and I can’t wait to read his backlist.

I liked everything about this book. It was fast paced and kept me guessing until the end. I’m hoping that there is a second book coming with the PI Alex Armstrong.

I’m not going to give any kind of synopsis, it’s best to go in blind. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an early copy in exchange for an honest opinion. Comes out on March 28th.
4.5⭐️

Those Empty Eyes is an intricate thriller with many interconnected cases and characters. It starts with a family murder cold case and continues with a campus case.
I recommend listening to the song Behind These Hazel Eyes while reading.
Thank you Kensington Publishing Corp for the delightful read!

Alexandra Quinlan was the sole survivor of the horrific murder of her family in their home. Found sitting on the floor of their bedroom holding the gun that killed them, the police didn’t believe that she had hidden during the massacre and later picked up the gun. Arrested and handcuffed, she was photographed by the media outside, gaining the nickname ‘Empty Eyes’ as she was led out in shock.

However, Donna Koppel the first police officer on the scene, while watching Alexandra being interviewed, began to feel that the detectives had got it wrong and called her husband, lawyer Garrett Lancaster to come down to the station to help the girl. With his help she was eventually released from juvenile detention and successfully sued the state for defamation.

Now 10 years later, Alexandra has changed her appearance, her personal history and her name to Alex Armstrong and works as a legal investigator for Garrett. She has never given up hoping to find who killed her family and keeps a corkboard with photos and what she knows about the night they died, but hasn’t made much headway in working out why they were targeted.

Alex’s latest case for Garrett involves investigating the disappearance of Laura McAllister, a college journalism student with a popular radio program called ‘The Scoop’ that has attracted a national audience. Laura had been about to release a big story that would put her college in a bad light and Alex is concerned that someone is trying to prevent it going to air. The police suspect Laura’s boyfriend Matthew Claymore of knowing something about her disappearance so his family has hired Garrett’s firm to protect him from a false arrest.

This intricately plotted complex tale will eventually take a very winding path to tie together the death of Alex’s family with Laura’s disappearance. There’s a lot crammed into the plot – pedophilia, rape, embezzlement, corruption, murder, a vigilante dispensing justice when the courts fail – so a fair degree of concentration (and some suspension of belief) is required to juggle all the threads. For me, the novel felt a bit bogged down with too many subplots, but it was worth hanging in there to eventually find out why Alex’s family were murdered and for the unexpected twist at the end.

In 2013, seventeen-year-old Alexandra Quinlan was the only member of her family found unharmed after her parents and younger brother are gunned down by an unknown assailant in their own home. Unfortunately for her, Alexandra was treated as a suspect and taken into custody. An over-ambitious journalist remarked on her “empty eyes” when she was being escorted out of her own home by the police in a state of shock. “Empty Eyes” was a name that stuck as did the rumors of her guilt, despite the police having found no solid ground to convict her and her winning a defamation case against the State. The police branded it a home invasion gone wrong and never pursued the case much further. Alexandra eventually left town but never stopped looking for the person who killed her family, meticulously searching for any leads that shed a light on what happened that night. She eventually returns after her past comes to haunt her resulting in a messy situation abroad. Fast forward to 2023, and we have Alexandra, now Alex Armstrong, working as a legal investigator for Garrett Lancaster, the same lawyer who represented her in her defamation case and has been a guardian, friend and well-wisher. Alex’s work involves investigating potential clients for the firm, and finding any evidence proving their guilt means the firm does not accept said client’s case. An investigation into a client accused of embezzlement triggers a sequence of events that eventually is found to have a connection with what happened to Alex’s family.

Having read and enjoyed Twenty Years Later by Charlie Donlea, I was excited to be able to read an advance copy of his latest offering. Those Empty Eyes starts strong and I did enjoy how the story was progressing up until the 30% mark after which several sub-plots (at least one of which was completely unnecessary and served no purpose other than distracting the reader’s attention from the central plot) are introduced into the story. With so many threads and tropes (ripped from the headlines gets tiring after a point!), the plot got convoluted and farfetched. I continued with this story because I really wanted to know who the murderer was and I liked a few of the strong female characters in the mix. The ending took me by surprise, proving my predictions wrong (I love it when that happens, so points for that!). I enjoy complex and intricately plotted thrillers but this one just felt like several books somewhat haphazardly squeezed into a single narrative, which detracted from my overall reading experience. Overall, though I didn’t completely dislike Those Empty Eyes by Charlie Donlea, I was a tad disappointed.

Many thanks to author Charlie Donlea, Kensington Books and NetGalley for the much-appreciated digital review copy. All opinions expressed in this review are my own. This novel is due to be released on March 28, 2023.

I love Charlie Donlea's books and this one was a super quick read, it kept me engaged from the very beginning. However, I think it was also probably my least favorite book of his. The more I think about it, the more I believe there are some aspects that don't make much sense. I guess I was enjoying the book much more when I had no idea what was going on and how the various plotlines would fit together. Once everything "clicked", it lost a bit of its magic. I liked the ending, but it was pretty obvious once you had all the ingredients mixed together.

I really enjoyed reading this one! I also appreciated that the ending was the perfect medium between abrupt and too drawn out - and it came with closure. There were unique, likeable characters, an adequate amount of twists, and nothing too outlandish or unbelievable. This author is so reliable for a great thriller - thanks for the opportunity to read!

Another book I couldn’t put down! I read the first book by this author and as soon as I was finished I got them all! He is an amazing writer. This book was full of adventures. And turns. Dare to jump in! This is a must read for me!

Charlie Donlea never disappoints! His latest thriller is full of twists and turns with an ultimately satisfying ending. When she was 17, Alexandra Quinlan's family was brutallly murdered, and Alexandra was accused of their murder, but later all charges were dropped, and with a settlement from a suit filed against the state for mismanagement of her case, Alexandra is able to move on with her life, but she never stops searching for answers as to what could have happened to her family.

Ten years later, as a legal investigator, Alexandra stumbles upon a case that has eerie parallels to her own parents murder and may hold the key to finally getting to the bottom of what happened to them - if she doesn't get herself killed first.