Keep Him Close by Emily Koch

I would like to thank Kate from Vintage Books for giving me an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Publisher - Vintage Books

Published - eBook (out now) Hardcover 19th March

Price - 99p Kindle eBook £12.99 hardback

ONE SON LIED. ONE SON DIED.

Alice’s son is dead. Indigo’s son is accused of murder.

Indigo is determined to prove her beloved Kane is innocent. Searching for evidence, she is helped by a kind stranger who takes an interest in her situation. Little does she know that her new friend has her own agenda.

Alice can’t tell Indigo who she really is. She wants to understand why her son was killed – and she needs to make sure that Indigo’s efforts to free Kane don’t put her remaining family at risk. But how long will it take for Indigo to discover her identity? And what other secrets will come out as she digs deeper?

No one knows a son like his mother. But neither Alice nor Indigo know the whole truth about their boys, and what happened between them on that fateful night.

Crime thrillers often focus on the unusual and the high stakes - the deaths of important people; the strangest murder scenario and the evilest villains. We tend not to remember that most crimes are just in that small article we read about on our local news website for a minute or less. We may immediately jump to stereotypes as to who the victims and culprits are and who brought them up. In Emily Koch’s stunning and emotionally powerful thriller Keep Him Close we see the mothers of the victim and the suspect and we have to try and fight our impressions of who we initially think these people are.

We first meet Alice and her two teenage sons Benny and Lou - having a traditional family row and also see Lou appears to have stolen money from her wallet. We then meet Indigo and her son Kane a film student whose mum is keen to finally meet her son’s new boyfriend. But by the next day Lou is dead; found dead from falling from a multi-storey car park and the police eventually suspect Kane of his murder and Kane then admits his guilt. Indigo is quite sure her son would never have crossed that line and is desperately trying to investigate the case herself which puts her in the library that Alice works at. Alice is keen herself to ensure her son’s killer is brought to justice decides not to admit her identity to Indigo but ‘helps’ the investigation so she can find more or aid her own justice. But the truth is bound to come out eventually..and that may change these women forever.

I absolutely loved this story. Despite the crime being so ‘simple’ it’s a story of perception. We first meet Lou and he is not a sympathetic teenager he’s moody; taunting of his mother and in comparison with his older brother Benny just plain unlikeable. But then we see that post death Lou was just a standard teenager full of good days and bad days - he didn’t deserve to die. Koch does even more with the theme in exploring the two main characters of Indigo and Alice. Indigo is a woman of compassion and joy - already happy to accept that her son is gay and encouraging him to meet the police to aid their enquiries. But once Kane is a suspect we see her get focused and will do anything to protect her son. Her love for Kane becomes the fuel not to stop. Alice however is a deliciously unlikeable character when we see her in action. The mother whose home is a all a shade of grey; goes to work and starts to tidy up Lou’s room a day or so after his deaths ….we find it hard to warm to the woman who has lost her son…she isn’t perhaps deserving of our sympathy. But this novel actually explores what makes people act the way they do and what may have then forced the events on the night Lou died.

Koch helps us see Indigo through first person and Alice through third person. Indigo is all about her feelings and also confusion. Alice is however pragmatic to the extreme - emotion for her gets in the way of what needs to be done. But we see what is on the surface isn’t perhaps what she can feel inside. We understand Alice’s relationship history and see how she ended up abandoned with two young toddlers to raise in the world. Children she decided she would put them first before anything. Indigo and Kane lost their husband/father in tragic circumstances that also haunt both of them in ways they don’t like to admit admit. Hence these two mothers find themselves in an odd game of cat and mouse trying to solve a crime and find out who each other is. This makes their scenes of opening up and assisting one another both compelling and also very tense. Can Alice actually help or hinder?

That leads to what I found the standout feature of the story it’s emotional exploration of grief, love and compassion. We see the raw loss of Alice and the few moments we see her mask of control slip are heartbreaking but also helping you realise she is not a robot. In fact as we know her more we realise her emotional reactions may be explained by something a lot more complex than simple snobbery. The relationship that builds with her and Indigo these two very different mothers losing their sons is amazingly complex and deep they realise they have strangely a lot in common and understand each other. This makes the final parts of the book heartbreaking and also surprisingly tender. As we start to see the events that happened on the tragic night we see how these life experiences collided Kane and Lou’s lives - and definitely start to suspect the truth isn’t as clear as the police think. It’s a story about understanding one another. As a reader we go on that journey of grief and it’s final scenes among some of the most powerful I’ve read in years. Kick has a wonderful way of making their characters three dimensional and so very very human. We understand them and that makes us care for everyone in the story.

I was throughly surprised how emotionally invested I got into this thriller. I tend to think of thrillers as puzzles and about intensity but here we have a mystery in the crime but far more emotional studies on the impact on the people involved that such an event touches, this is something a lot of crime stories shy away from. This novel embraces it and gives us a fascinating psychological examination of what a violent crime and tragic death can do to families. I found myself on a journey where my own preconceptions of what make people tick were challenged and changed with a final set of chapters that released a lot of emotion (and tears) making this one of my early favourite reads of the year. It’s thoroughly recommended.