About the Book

A strange sensation runs through me, a feeling that I don’t know this person in front of me, even though he matters more to me than anyone ever has, than anyone ever will.

You go into your son’s bedroom. It’s the usual mess. You tidy up some dirty plates, pick up some clothes, open the wardrobe to put them away.

And that’s when you find it. Something so shocking it doesn’t seem real.

And you realize a horrifying truth…

Your own son might be dangerous…

My Thoughts

The premise of Keep Her Close grabbed my attention right away! Steph is an FBI agent and a single mum to her teenage son Zach. One day she is in his room and she makes a horrifying discovery in his wardrobe. I immediately wanted to know more and I’m happy to say that this book kept me gripped all the way through.

Steph is an FBI agent and is trained in spotting when someone is lying and so when she confronts her son and he denies all knowledge she is convinced he’s telling the truth. This made for an interesting dynamic because I think people find it hard to believe a loved one is doing anything wrong so I wasn’t sure that Steph was right to believe Zach so easily. By the same token it’s her job to know and she understands issues of security so I wondered if maybe she was right and someone was setting Zach, or possibly her, up.

Keep Her Close is set in the present day but there are a few flashbacks spread throughout the novel, and I really enjoyed that element. I like being able to slowly piece together someone’s background and to build up a picture of how they got to be who they are.

Keep Her Close soon ramps up the tension as a colleague of Steph’s approaches her with intelligence he has about a domestic anarchist group that Zach may be involved in. Steph starts digging, determined to prove that her son is being set up but the investigation leads down some dark paths and I ended up not being sure at all of who I could trust in this novel.

I really liked Steph throughout this novel. She’s something of a flawed character in that she is stubborn and doesn’t easily let people in, neither in her private life nor at work, and this makes things harder for her. She also gets fixated on a particular problem to the detriment of other things that she should be doing. And she’s fiercely protective of her son. But, for me, all of this made her human and meant I could identify with her a lot of the time and I was always rooting for her.

This was such a fast-paced, gripping novel and it would make a perfect holiday read – it’s a book to pick up and devour while the real world disappears for a while!

Many thanks to the publisher for my copy of this book. All thoughts are my own.

Keep You Close is out now and available here.

About the Author

Karen Cleveland spent eight years as a CIA analyst, focusing on counterterrorism and working briefly on rotation to the FBI. She has master’s degrees from Trinity College Dublin and Harvard University. She lives in northern Virginia with her husband and two young sons.

You can find the rest of this tour at the following blogs: