Stephanie Maddox is a single mother and the head of the FBI’s Internal Affairs department. Her teenaged son Zachary is her primary driving force, that and her pursuit of the truth.
As the victim of a crime that she felt could not be prosecuted, Steph takes her personal frustration and turns it to her job, where after years of investigating organized crime in Chicago, she now takes on the dirty agents whose crimes sully the Bureau’s reputation. But all her hard work gets set aside when an old friend comes to visit one night. A fellow agent and ex-boyfriend, now tasked with investigating domestic terrorism, brings bad news. Zachary’s name has come up in a case. It looks like he could be part of an anti-American group that may be planning a violent attack.
Steph denies any possibility that it could be true, but as the days go on, she starts to wonder how well she really knows her son. She looks through his room and finds a gun in the closet. In talking with him, she discovers he’d quit his extracurricular activities, thinking that colleges wouldn’t look at the second semester of his senior year. He has a girlfriend she’s never met. And after following him home one day, she realizes that Zachary knows one of her deepest secrets, one she’d never told him. He knows who his father is.
Steph digs more into the FBI’s case against this terrorist group and against her son, and instead of finding answers, what she finds is some of her old “friends” coming back into her life. Her investigations into organized crime made her some enemies, and she starts to wonder if they are the ones making Zachary look like a terrorist. Maybe it was someone from her past in Internal Affairs. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s the worst possible possibility—maybe Zachary really has fallen in with a terrorist group.
As Steph continues to dig for information, she realizes she is jeopardizing everything to protect her son—her job, her relationships, even her life. Putting the pieces together in time is the only hope she has of keeping her son alive, and giving him a future.
Karen Cleveland’s Keep You Close is a powerful thriller filled with insider information into politics and the FBI. It’s a fascinating look at those top-level investigations, although there does come a point where it gets a little confusing, trying to keep all the theories straight. I loved the character of Stephanie, and I enjoyed rooting for her and her deep-seated need for the truth.
However, and it breaks my heart that there is a “however” with this book, I found the ending really disappointing. I was so hoping for an an elegant ending, but that is not what I got. Keep You Close is a good book, exceptionally well written most of the way through, but don’t expect a happy ending. Maybe someday there will be another novel to address that? Or maybe there is just disappointment.
Galleys for Keep You Close were provided by Ballentine Books through NetGalley, with many thanks.