Review of Too Close to Breathe by Olivia Kiernan

Too Close to Breathe, published in 2018, takes place in and around Dublin, Ireland and is part police procedural and part thriller.

Detective Chief Superintendent Frankie Sheehan just got back to work after being injured on the job a few months earlier.  Her first case is the investigation of the death of a woman, Eleanor Costello, who appears to have hanged herself.  Frankie quickly senses that Eleanor was murdered, and another check of the crime scene confirms her suspicions.  The subsequent investigation reveals two other murders connected to Eleanor’s.  However, the investigation drags on for months as Frankie and her team chase several red herrings.  The powers that be are about to relegate the investigations to the cold case files when Frankie finally exposes the killer.

As this story is set in Ireland, the police don’t carry guns, or not usually at least.  Frankie was injured on the job twice because she didn’t have a weapon to defend herself.  Another contributing factor to her injuries was the fact that she didn’t like to wait for backup.  Both scenarios were frustrating to read.  They did, however, heighten the tension quite a bit, as did the red herrings.  The second half of the book definitely had my heart racing for the finish line.

Despite the occasional frustrations, I really enjoyed Too Close to Breathe, and I got through it fast.  Not everything was tense, though.  Frankie was seeing a therapist to deal with the trauma of her first injury, and her therapist recommended she take care of a Bonsai tree as a form of therapy.  The scenes of Frankie clipping and forming the tree almost acted as a metaphor for how well the investigation was going.  Then when the investigation stalled and Frankie and her team kept hitting brick walls, the tree wasn’t doing so hot.  I also liked that Frankie was well-respected by her team, and she was good friends with her immediate supervisor and one of her detectives.  The three of them met at their favorite pub several times throughout the book to share conversation and a drink, which was very Irish of them.