The Comfort of Ordinary Secrets


On certain nights, when the brain is tired but restless, you don’t want literature; you want company. Not philosophy, not moral weight, just a small engine of story to idle beside. An Eye for Murder by Libby Fischer Hellmann is built for exactly that kind of night. It doesn’t ask for devotion, only attention. The story moves with the confidence of a paperback you can trust: steady rhythm, clear stakes, no pretensions of grandeur.

Ellie Forman, a Chicago documentary filmmaker, gets tangled in a murder investigation after a misdelivered letter arrives at her door. It’s the sort of coincidence that mysteries are made of, one small mistake that opens an entire world of secrets. Her curiosity, equal parts human and professional, leads her into the lives of strangers and the shadow of history, tracing threads back to the Holocaust and forward into her own neighborhood. The story is lean and unshowy, propelled not by literary flourish but by motion, something always happening, always just enough to make you turn the page. 

What keeps the book from fading entirely into formula is Ellie herself. She’s a maker of stories, not a detective, and that difference matters. Her lens is literal: she’s accustomed to shaping meaning out of fragments, interviews, and archival scraps. When she investigates a murder, she’s doing what she always does, gathering evidence of lives, trying to build a coherent narrative from scattered truths. In that sense, the book’s title feels double-edged. It isn’t just about a murder witnessed; it’s about the act of seeing itself, the moral burden of looking too closely or not closely enough.

Hellmann dips her mystery into history, the wartime traumas that refuse to stay buried, but she doesn’t dwell there long. This isn’t a heavy book; it only grazes the weight of its subject, acknowledging pain without collapsing beneath it. Some readers will wish it went deeper, others will appreciate the restraint. Either way, what emerges is a sense that the past is never entirely past. It lingers in quiet rooms, in sealed envelopes, in the lives of people who pretend they’ve moved on.

The writing is straightforward, occasionally stiff, but earnest. You can feel the author’s enjoyment in the structure, a mystery assembled like a well-balanced edit in Ellie’s own documentary footage. There are clues to be found, threads to be tied, and a clean ending that reassures more than it surprises. If the prose doesn’t sing, it at least hums a tune you know. There’s comfort in that predictability, the way an old procedural show rerun can feel oddly grounding after a long day.

Still, An Eye for Murder leaves a faint aftertaste,  not of shock, but of recognition. It’s about how easily we overlook what’s around us, how much story lives in ordinary spaces. The dead neighbor, the wrong letter, the quiet house next door: all of them repositories of memory waiting for someone curious enough to ask questions. Ellie’s job is to document what others forget, and in a culture addicted to speed and surface, that almost feels radical. The novel may not challenge the form, but it remembers why the form exists, to remind us that truth often hides in plain sight.

By the time it ends, the crime is solved, the camera packed away, and the world returns to its normal hum. You close the book and feel nothing grand, but a small satisfaction,  the kind that comes from order briefly restored. An Eye for Murder doesn’t aim to change your life, and maybe that’s the point. It’s a quiet argument for curiosity, for paying attention, for treating even the smallest mysteries as worth a second look. And sometimes, that’s enough.

Image: Cover of An Eye for Murder by Libby Fischer Hellmann. © 2002 by Libby Fischer Hellmann. Published by Poisoned Pen Press. Used here under the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law for purposes of commentary and literary criticism.
Image: Photograph of Libby Fischer Hellmann. © 2025 Libby Fischer Hellmann. Used with attribution for commentary and review purposes under the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law.

 

Location: Washington, DC, USA

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