Book Review: Too Close to Home

It's Friday morning and Memorial Day weekend is here.

Do you have anything good to read?

No?

Well, you do now. For free!

Too Close to Home is Book 1 in the Women of Justice series by Lynette Eason. As of this writing, it's available as a FREE Nook download or a FREE Kindle download. Don't have a Nook or a Kindle? Just download the free app to your PC or smartphone. You'll be glad you did.

I downloaded Too Close to Home to my iTouch a few days ago after seeing it on the list of free Christian books my friend Keiki Hendrix compiles each week over at The Vessel Project. It looked interesting, and it was free, so what did I have to lose?

Plus, it turned out the author, Lynette Eason, was raised in Greenville, graduated from USC (I'm trying not to hold that against her), then Converse College and currently resides in Spartanburg, which is where the action in Too Close to Home takes place. I'm all for supporting a local author, so I dove in.

Now, I used to be one of those people who would read a book to the end no matter what. But my reading time is precious these days and if a book doesn't grab me fast, I'm not likely to stick with it.

Believe me when I say, that was not a problem with Too Close to Home. The problem was putting it down long enough to sleep. And then the problem was trying to stop thinking about the predicament Samantha and Connor were in and were they going to get out of it alive.

Too Close to Home is heavy on mystery and intrigue, the characters are flawed but likeable, and the message that God is worth trusting even when life is turned upside down runs throughout the story without turning it into a sermon. Oh, and there's a sweet little romance brewing, too!

There was enough foreshadowing in the early chapters to have me worried about several characters, but the author didn't fall into the trap of picking the most obvious course of action. In fact, one character that I expected to wind up in serious trouble came through the whole thing unscathed . . . until I read the last page. Turns out I wasn't imagining it. That poor girl is in serious danger. And I'm going to have to read book two, Don't Look Back, to find out what happens next.

Which I intend to do . . . as soon as I can get to a bookstore!