A review by ericarobyn
Keep Your Friends Close by Lucinda Berry

emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

3.5

Keep Your Friends Close by Lucinda Berry is a tale of friendship, secrets, and the wild things people will do for love.

What starts out as a traumatic accident when a woman is found floating in her own pool during a party, readers slowly watch the drama unfold as everyone turns against one another in suspicion. But there’s not just drama within the mommy group itself, it’s in each of their homes as well. 

Gambling, credit card debt, inability to keep a job, infidelity, lying… these spouses are all up to one trouble or another, and slowly, their partners are finding out, all while still reeling from the murder of their friend. But that’s not all! The friends themselves also have their secrets and problems. 

I am obsessed with the drama here! The author does an amazing job of making everyone look guilty! I also really enjoyed how the author gets us in each of the character’s heads and we jump between perspectives as well as the present timeline and the various points in the past. I both loved and hated every single one of the characters here! 

What a wild ride from start to finish!

My Favorite Passages from Keep Your Friends Close –

Emergency vehicles surrounded the property. Their lights danced and sparkled like Christmas bulbs in the windows. But this wasn’t Christmas, and there wasn’t an emergency. Not anymore. They were too late.

Whitney just stared straight ahead like she hadn’t heard me and I wasn’t standing next to her. Her eyes were glazed over, lost somewhere. She looked like a crumpled deer on the side of the road.

Her announcement that she was leaving me. That she didn’t want to be married anymore was about as unexpected and dramatic as if an actual bomb had landed in our kitchen.

You could tell a lot about a person from what they rambled about when they were uncomfortable.

Our playing fields weren’t equal. They never had been. I wasn’t even sure we were playing the same game.

Men didn’t have the same burden, so how could he know? How could I expect him to understand? No man really could. They got points just for sticking around and not leaving. Their bar for parenthood was set so low, you could step over it. Ours was impossible to reach, and there was no way to win no matter what you did.

My Final Thoughts on Keep Your Friends Close –

Get ready for a twisted and dark tale that reads like a blend of a murder mystery and a train wreck of events the characters get themselves into! You just won’t be able to look away from the mess, watching it all unfold and display even more layers of drama!