Too Close to Home, by Lynette Eason (Revell, April 2010)
Connor Wolfe is the lead detective on a team dedicated to solving—and stopping—a string of abductions. Each victim is a teen girl, and so far three of them have turned up dead. Connor has a personal stake in this case as well: his 16-year-old daughter, Jenna, fits the victims’ age range.
FBI Special Agent Samantha Cash is the forensic computer genius who may be their only hope to crack this case. When she finds evidence that the girls have been lured by an online predator, the killer starts a war of intimidation.
As if things weren’t complicated enough, Connor and Samantha each have family concerns pulling at them. And they can’t stop thinking about one another, despite Samantha’s vow to never date a cop. (Connor is a widower.)
I appreciate the main characters’ depth, and the honest way they wrestle with their faith in relation to the tragedies in their pasts and present. The novel has a good balance between characters and plot, and both deliver the reader to a satisfying ending.
Lynette Eason pulls off a taut romantic suspense novel that’s on the intense end of the suspense scale. I didn’t find it scary, but there were times I needed to put it down and catch my breath. It never stayed down for long.
I would have liked to see a bit more resolution to the fallout from the crimes. Rather than spoil the plot, I’ll just say not all parties were accounted for at the end. But that’s a curiosity issue more than anything else.
The novel’s epilogue sets up the next story and plants a serious worry in the reader’s mind. A worry we’ll have to wait until October 2010 to satisfy, when book 2 in the “Women of Justice” series comes out.
Too Close to Home is a well-crafted novel, but you don’t have to take my word for it. Dee Henderson gave it a positive endorsement, and her own best-selling romantic suspense novels prove she knows a thing or two about the genre.
Too Close to Home is Lynette Eason’s eighth novel. You can read an excerpt here or if you’ve already read the novel, check out the discussion questions here. You can learn more about Lynette at her website, and she’s promised to stop by this blog for an interview some Friday soon.