Too Close to Home Review: Lynette Eason Opens Women of Justice

I put off Too Close to Home for the better part of two years, and the reason is worth stating before anything else. The back cover mentions missing teenagers, and after thirty-one years of putting books into the hands of children, that particular sentence lands differently on me than it might on you. What finally moved it off the shelf was plainer than that. I had read nothing by Lynette Eason, I had eight women expecting me to bring a book to the fellowship room in September, and Revell had seen fit to reissue this one in a repackaged paperback, which generally means a publisher still believes in it. So I bought a copy, carried it to the green chair by the front window, and read it in August of 2024. What follows is what I would tell you if you were standing in my hallway with your coat still on.

Here is the short version, for anyone deciding quickly. Too Close to Home is book one of four in the Women of Justice series, 336 pages in the Revell paperback, and it sets an FBI agent and a detective on the same case from two sides at once. There is a romance running alongside the investigation, handled lightly enough that it never takes the wheel. Faith is on the page the way Eason puts it there, present and unhurried, with no sermon in sight. And there is a subject at the center of the case that I will describe plainly a few paragraphs down, because nobody should buy this one blind. My copy sits on the hall bookcase now, and the line in my notebook reads: for the reader who wants a case and a partnership more than a chase.

How I've Used It

I read it once, straight through, over about eight evenings in August of 2024. That is close to my usual pace of one novel every ten days, which tells you something by itself. Books that drag go slower than ten days. Books that seize me by the collar go faster, and only one novel in recent memory went faster than this one did. Too Close to Home sat exactly where a well-made suspense novel should sit: I never once considered setting it aside unfinished, and I never once stayed up past midnight because I could not put it down. I am sixty-six years old and I like my sleep, so take the second half of that sentence as the compliment it is.

The pencil stayed busy, though not in the margins. With a book like this I mostly note structure, because structure is what tells me who to hand it to next. The chapters are short. The point of view moves between the two investigators, which keeps the middle from sagging the way single-viewpoint suspense so often does. And the case advances in visible steps, so that on any given evening I knew what had been learned and what had not. That sounds like faint praise. It is not. A great many suspense novels on the shelf cannot tell you what was learned.

I brought it to the group on the second Tuesday of September, and that meeting ran twenty minutes past our usual stopping time. In four years of monthly meetings, that has happened with this book and no other. I will come back to what the women actually said, but I note the clock here because it is the most honest measure I have. Eight women, one book, nobody watching the hour.

What Eason Is Doing With This First Book

A first book in a four-book series has a job beyond telling its own story. It has to lay the ground the other three will stand on, and it has to do that without turning into a tour of the furniture. Eason manages this better than most. The two leads, FBI agent Samantha Cash and detective Connor Wolfe, are introduced through their work rather than through a summary of their childhoods, and the working relationship between them is the spine of the whole thing. They are not a pair of loners who happen to collide in a parking lot. They are professionals with different jurisdictions, different instincts, and a case neither of them can close alone.

That pairing is why I would hand this to someone ahead of a dozen other suspense novels on my shelf. A single investigator working alone is a fine engine for a chase. Two investigators working the same ground from different angles is a better engine for a case, because every conversation carries information the other one did not have, and the reader gets to hold both halves at once. It also gives the romance somewhere honest to stand. When the personal thread runs between two people who are already obliged to talk to each other about difficult things, it does not feel bolted on for the sake of a cover blurb.

Eason writes clean. I do not mean only that the language is free of profanity, though it is. I mean that the violence happens off the page and the reader is told what matters without being walked through it step by step. For a suspense novel carrying this subject, that is a deliberate choice and a difficult one, and it is the choice that makes the book usable for the readers I spend my days recommending to.

The Subject Matter, Said Plainly

Now the part I promised to say plainly. The case at the center of Too Close to Home involves missing teenagers who are found dead. The listing says so, and I am repeating it because a reader deserves to know before she gives a book her evening. This is not a cozy. Nobody is poisoned in a vicarage while the kettle boils. The stakes are the worst stakes there are for anyone who has raised a child or taught one, and the book does not pretend otherwise for the sake of comfort.

Whether that is too much for you is not a question I can answer on your behalf. I can tell you what it was like for me. I am the mother of two grown children and I ran a school library for three decades, and I read it without difficulty, because Eason keeps the horror at arm's length and keeps the focus on the work of stopping it. I can also tell you that one of the eight women at the table said she could not have read this book ten years ago, and that she was glad she had read it now. Take both of those together and decide for yourself, which is the only way anyone ever decides anything.

Where the Book Slows Down

Every book I hand out has a soft spot, and I will not pretend this one does not. The middle stretch carries a good deal of procedure, and procedure is not everyone's pleasure. A reader who wants something happening on every fourth page will find her attention wandering somewhere around the point where interviews are compared and alibis are checked and checked again. I find that stretch deeply satisfying, the way I once found a well-kept card catalog satisfying, but I am aware of how that sounds to a normal person.

The romance is the other place opinions will divide. It arrives fairly early and it stays, and a reader who wants her suspense entirely dry will notice it and possibly resent it. I did not mind. It is written with restraint, and it gives the two leads something to protect besides the case file. But if you have no patience at all for a love story threaded through an investigation, this is not the book that will convert you, and I would rather say so than have you tell me afterward that I oversold it.

One more small thing, offered as a reader and not as a critic. At 336 pages this is not a long book, but it is a first book in a series, and it leaves the wider arc of the four open when it closes. That is not a flaw in the writing. It is simply the reason to buy the first one with some intention of buying the second.

How It Sat With Eight Women Around a Table

Our group meets in the fellowship room, eight of us, one book a month, second Tuesday. Dottie is seventy-four and has been my reading friend longer than anyone there, and she guesses the culprit early as a matter of settled principle. She guessed early on this one too, and she was pleased with herself, and the twenty minutes that followed her announcement were the best discussion we have had in four years of meeting. That is the whole of what I will tell you about it.

What the group talked about was not the answer to the case. It was the two leads. Whether a woman in Samantha Cash's position would truly have done what she does. Whether Connor Wolfe was credible as a detective or merely convenient as a love interest. And, from the two women who work with young people every week, whether the book handles its subject responsibly or uses it. The room did not agree on all of it, which is the mark of a book worth an evening. Nobody called it thin. That is rarer than you would think.

How It Compares to the Other Four on My Shelf

I keep five of these at home and readers often ask me to place one against another. Terri Blackstock's If I Run is the fast one, the only novel in recent memory I finished in two nights, and it trades quiet for speed. Colleen Coble's Without a Trace gives you a small town, a search dog and a series to settle into, and it asks more emotionally of you in its opening chapters than Eason asks anywhere in this book. Dee Henderson's Traces of Guilt is the patient one, detective work over movement, and it will frustrate a reader who came for a chase. Francine Rivers's Bridge to Haven is the long one, and it is not a mystery at all.

Too Close to Home sits between Blackstock and Henderson. It moves faster than Henderson and it thinks more than Blackstock. If you want the case worked rather than run at, this is the one I would put in your hands first, and it is the one I would put in your hands ahead of most of what gets published under the suspense label in any given year.

We ran twenty minutes over. In four years of monthly meetings that has happened with this book and no other.

Who This Is For

This is for the reader who wants a case worked properly by two people who are good at their jobs, and who wants to close the book without having been dragged through anything she cannot unsee. It is for the woman who finished the Blackstock trilogy and wants a bit more investigative weight on the next one. It is for a book group, honestly, because there is enough in the two leads and in the handling of a difficult subject to fill an evening of argument. And it is for anyone who likes to begin a series at the beginning, since this is book one of four and reads the way a first book should.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if the phrase missing teenagers found dead is one you already know will follow you to bed. There is no shame in that, and I would rather tell you now than have you find out forty pages in. Skip it if you want unbroken action from the first page to the last, because the middle belongs to procedure and paperwork and patient conversation. Skip it if any romantic thread at all irritates you inside a suspense novel. And skip it if you insist that a first book tie off every thread it opens, because Eason leaves the series standing and means to.