Far from You by Tess Sharpe (review)

It doesn’t seem to matter that when Mina died, seventeen-year-old Sophie Winters, Mina’s best friend, had been clean for months or that it was Mina who dragged Sophie out to the woods in the middle of that fateful night. The cops have decided that the masked man who attacked Sophie and killed Mina was Sophie’s dealer, that it was all just a drug deal gone wrong, and that Sophie should feel lucky to have just been shipped off to rehab and not juvie. Sophie, however, is intent on finding the real murderer, following up on a lead aspiring journalist Mina was pursuing for a story. Along the way, Sophie must come to terms with the car accident that led to her reliance on Oxycontin and with the fact that she and Mina had moved from best friends to lovers, a development that Mina insisted on keeping secret. Between Sophie’s addiction, Mina’s death, and their hidden affair, this could have easily veered off into melodrama, but Sharpe instead wrings the hurt out of each of these elements in slow but deliberate strokes, creating a lacerating picture of grief and regret. Through flashbacks, readers come to see that Sophie’s addiction is not the result of one single moment but a series of decisions made in times of understandable pain, as unplanned as the romance the childhood friends find themselves falling into. Secondary characters are credibly nuanced, particularly Mina’s older brother, whose attraction to Sophie is tangled up in his guilt about causing the car crash that left her in chronic pain. The murder mystery is compelling (and, thankfully, unconnected to Mina’s sexuality), and its resolution serves as a reminder that love is irrevocably tied to loss and that few people get out of it unscathed.