Title: So Close
Author: Sylvia Day
Publisher/Year:  Sylvia Day 3/28/23
Length:  326 pages
Series: Blacklist #1

Overview

You can’t believe all of them, but can you trust any of them?

Widower Kane Black is still ruinously married to his late wife, Lily. Grief has hollowed him . . . until he sees a woman with his wife’s inimitable beauty on the streets of Manhattan. He whisks her up to his towering penthouse, protectively under guard, nestling her in dark opulence where Lily’s memory is a possessive, beguiling force.

Aliyah, Kane’s mother, deals in science. There are too many questions, too few answers, and too much at stake. Lily has dangerous control over Kane and there can be only one queen on the throne.

Amy, Kane’s sister-in-law, has been bloodied by deceit and betrayal, and she’s devolving into murderous rage. She’s paid too high a price and now intends to claim what she’s owed.

Three women, linked by buried secrets, circle the man who unquestioningly accepts the return of his beloved long-dead wife. Kane is happier than he’s ever been, and he’ll do anything to stay that way.

My Thoughts

The summary above definitely gives you a sense that this story is going to be complex, rooted in a lot of different character stories, and engaging to read. It doesn’t disappoint. It’s been a minute since we’ve had a great new series from this amazing author – Ms Sylvia Day, but it was almost worth the wait!

Just like we see above, Kane is our leading man – someone who’s still devoted to his wife even though she’s just a memory. We know that his past was dark, that his family never met Lily, and there’s so much that no one can really wrap their heads around. Lily has a very specific look that everyone knows because of how devoted and obsessed Kane is, and women try to emulate that in the hopes of getting into his line of sight.

Like Kane’s past, there are mysteries as to what exactly happened to make him and the family who they are. We know that his father embezzled money and left them with nothing – ruining the company that they worked so hard to develop. Kane and his mother were able to bring it back to life, and we learn that it was in part due to Lily that funding came through. This comes to the misery of Kane’s mother – a women who has her own ambitions to do things to take even more control over the business and her children.

Amy wants kane – she’s married to his brother, has made her rounds with the brothers as a matter of fact, but the challenge is that it seems more about the quest rather than the reward and we don’t know what’s at stake. She’s a woman who developed and crafted her own successful business that was absorbed into the family company, and she regrets that choice. She’s insecure of her relationship with her husband at the meddling of her mother-in-law and it manifests in a drinking problem and misplaced anger. The path that we watch her go down is one that’s so sad for a woman who has so much.

Then there’s Lily – or whomever she really is. As the summary says, she’s come back from the dead, but while she insinuates that she doesn’t know what the past few years held for her, there’s clearly more to the story than we know. There are constant blends of lies with few truths, but we don’t now what the truths are. She has relationships that were cultivated with ill intent and that will lead us to the end of this first book where things happen that we continue to have questions about. There’s a murder, a murderous past, and a confusion over who is connected to whom, for how long and why.

On top of all that, there’s Kane’s ‘assistant’ of sorts – Witte. A man who sees more than anyone realizes, and a man so cultured that he made Kane into the man that he is now. There’s something mysterious about him and something that he sees about those around him that makes me feel like he’s going to play a pivotal role in the next installment of the series.

So…where does that leave us? Relationships that are intense, sensual and dark, and often times without hope. We don’t know who’s going to make it out alive, who’s going to see their demise and who will walk away with more than what they came into the story with. I don’t know who’s going to fall on each side of that, and I cannot wait to see what happens. Enjoy!