Too Close to Home

Seraphina Nova Glass’s 2024 novel, Too Close to Home, is a domestic thriller set in the affluent lakefront community of Cloverhill Lakes. The story begins when a deadly car bomb kills a woman at the annual Labor Day party. The explosion horrifies her friend Regan Hoffman, a grieving widow, when she realizes the bomb was intended for her. This violent event shatters the town’s placid facade, ensnaring Regan and her friends in a desperate search for the truth as they confront hidden dangers and destructive secrets. The novel explores themes of The Illusion of Suburban Security, The Isolating Weight of Secrets, and The Collapse of Ethics Under Threat. Glass is a two-time Edgar Award-nominated novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. Her 2022 novel, On a Quiet Street, was a #1 Amazon bestseller and a New York Times Summer Read. Her other works include The Vacancy in Room 10, The Vanishing Hour, Such a Good Wife, and Someone’s Listening. 

This guide refers to the 2024 Park Row Books edition.

Content Warning: The source text and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, physical and emotional abuse, substance use, addiction, mental illness, illness or death, and cursing.

Plot Summary

In the affluent lakefront community of Cloverhill Lakes, the lives of three women are thrown into chaos following a deadly explosion. At the annual Labor Day party, Regan Hoffman, a widow struggling with anxiety and grief, allows the party’s organizer, Ally Whitlock, to borrow her car to get ice. The car explodes, killing Ally instantly. Regan is horrified to realize the bomb was meant for her. 

Meanwhile, Regan’s friend Andi Bennett, recently remarried to a man named Carson, is consumed by a bitter feud with Tia Hainsley, the new wife of her ex-husband, Ray. Andi’s conflict with Tia culminates in a public fight. Later, after Carson teaches her to shoot a gun on their wooded property, Andi stumbles upon Tia’s body near their fence. Believing she accidentally shot Tia, Andi panics and conceals the body.

Regan and Andi’s friend, Sasha Blanc, is new to the neighborhood and married to a wealthy restaurateur, Tom. Secretly, she visits her ex-husband, Raffy Carro, regularly, trying to help him through his struggle with alcohol addiction. Years earlier, Raffy served a three-year sentence after a drug dealer planted cocaine on him and Sasha at an airport. Despite their innocence, Raffy took the blame to protect Sasha from likely imprisonment. Traumatized by his time in a Mexican jail, Raffy developed alcoholism, leading to their eventual divorce. Sasha worries about her increasingly withdrawn teenage son, Drew, from her previous marriage. Growing suspicious of what he might be involved in, Sasha follows him to an abandoned building and witnesses a clandestine exchange. When she later finds red construction paper in his room—the same kind used in a recent bomb hoax at the elementary school—her fear for her son escalates.

To evade a town-wide search party for Tia, Andi moves the body from its hiding place under a tarp into a large, unused meat freezer in her garage. She finds Tia’s phone and, in a panic to dispose of it in a river, accidentally makes a call to Ray, leading police to believe Tia might be alive. Andi proceeds to sink Tia’s body in the Connecticut River, narrowly avoiding discovery when a police officer pulls her over for a broken taillight. 

Regan’s paranoia intensifies when a selfie taken at a school play reveals her dead husband, Jack, in the background. She chases him to a train station, but he vanishes. Regan posts Jack’s photo on a “Missed Connections” online forum and is contacted by Beatrice, a waitress in Windsor Locks who recognizes him as a regular at her café. Soon after, an intruder breaks into Regan’s house, ransacking the basement and attacking her. The assailant flees, leaving Regan to discover a hidden safe containing ID for Jack under the name Patrick Finch. She then receives a text threatening her life if she continues to investigate.

Determined to find out what Drew is involved in, Sasha puts a GPS tracker on his car and follows him to a smoke shop, where she sees him meeting with dangerous-looking men. When she enters the building to investigate, she is ambushed by the men, who break her finger and threaten her to stay away.

The news breaks that Tia’s body has been found, but the cause of death was bludgeoning, not a gunshot. Andi is stunned to realize she is not the killer. Racked with guilt and confusion, she discovers a folder in her daughter Roxie’s room filled with research on the murders. Roxie and Drew confess they have been conducting a secret investigation. They initially suspected Sasha’s ex-husband Raffy of the bombing after seeing him at the party, drunk and belligerent. They therefore planted the hoax school bomb threat as a diversion. Roxie and Drew also reveal they found a piece of Tia’s burned headband in Raffy’s firepit and have uncovered a link between Raffy’s past imprisonment in Mexico and Jack Hoffman. 

Meanwhile, Regan confronts Jack in Windsor Locks, where he admits his real name is Patrick Finch. He witnessed a murder by the Terreli crime family years ago and faked his own death to protect Regan and their daughter Hallie after the family tracked him down. He tells her that Sasha’s husband, Tom Blanc, is the brother of the man he helped imprison. Andi, armed with the kids’ research, goes to Sasha’s house to warn her but is attacked by Tom, who takes her to Raffy’s remote property and locks her in a shed.

Sasha rushes to Raffy’s house, where she finds him tied to a chair. Tom appears and confesses everything: He is a Terreli and has been setting up Raffy to take the fall for his crimes. He admits he killed Tia after she snooped on his phone and discovered his identity, then planted her body on Andi’s property to frame her. Andi manages to break out of the shed but is shot by Tom. Regan, led to the house by a location ping from Andi, arrives to find her friend bleeding on the ground. She confronts Tom with a shotgun, and a struggle ensues. Just as police sirens approach, Tom takes Sasha hostage and escapes in a truck. He drives recklessly through the woods and crashes over a cliff. Sasha survives, but Tom falls to the rocks below.

In the aftermath, Tom is found alive and hospitalized under police guard, while his father, Al—the crime boss Murphy Terreli—is arrested. Jack and Andi recover from their injuries, but Jack’s deception fractures Regan’s marriage. Sasha moves her children to Tucson to be near Raffy, who enters rehab. 

Weeks later, Tom escapes from the hospital. He tracks Sasha to the rehab center, cuts the power, and shoots a security guard while taking Sasha hostage. As he prepares to kill Raffy, Sasha attacks him. She and Raffy flee to the kitchen, but Tom pursues them. Sasha thrusts a pair of kitchen scissors into Tom’s neck, killing him.