Too Close for Comfort

Volume XXV / Issue 7 - October 19 / 2018
Deep in the Heart of Madison
Deep in the Heart of Madison
  • context: Array
  • icon:
  • icon_position: before
  • theme_hook_original: google_books_biblio

Too Close for Comfort

Author: 
Henry Cline
Brockville, ON: Sands Press
2018 138 pp., trade pbk., $14.99
ISBN: 
978-1-988281-39-1
Grades: 
9 and up
Ages: 
14 and up
Review by: 
Sarah Wethered
4
Excerpt: 

Sam Miller is . . . Or, was my best friend.

I’m sorry, it just seems hard to know how to word it once someone who was so close to you decides to take their own life. Do I say he’ll always be my best friend, or since he committed suicide, would I say he was..?

And if I say he was, does that make it seem like I don’t care? Because I do, I cared more than I thought anyone else did, up to a point where I ended up figuring everything out with almost no help at all.

I’m not trying to sound like a hero or anything of the sort. But I am trying to say that I, Jack Sampson, solved the case that most believed did not exist.

I speak very vaguely now, but soon, it’ll all make sense.

Too Close for Comfort is a mystery novel set in the small town of Stanton, MI, in 2012. The most well-liked boy in school, Sam Miller, has committed suicide two weeks before he was to graduate. The suicide impacts every member of the 85-member graduating class, but most of all, it affects Jack Sampson, Sam’s best friend. Jack is confused about Sam’s death and begins to feel that it was not really a suicide, but a murder – one committed by one of his classmates. This suspicion leads Jack to begin investigating the circumstances surrounding the death, an investigation having results that no one could imagine.

Readers of Too Close for Comfort will be drawn into the compelling mystery of Sam’s death and Jack’s race to solve it before graduation, the time when all the suspects will disperse to begin their adult lives.Was Jack’s hunch about Sam not wanting to die correct? Who among his classmates is the murderer?

Too Close for Comfort will be enjoyed by mystery novel readers. The entire story occurs in less than two weeks, and its fast pace will keep readers engaged. Lastly, the book’s short length will encourage reluctant readers to pick up it up.

Highly Recommended
Reviewer: 

Sarah Wethered has been a teacher-librarian at New Westminster Secondary School for 18 years, and she currently lives in New Westminster, British Columbia.