In Close to Death, Horowitz uses the conventions of the cozy mystery genre to probe the question of what makes a “good neighbor.” Riverview Close is a tight-knit community. As Andrew Pennington says, “It’s a wonderful word […] a close. Because that was what we all were. Closeness was what we had” (281). However, Horowitz shows that there is a darker side to intimacy. In the case of Riverview Close, it requires secret keeping and conspiracy, even in the face of murder.

To Riverview’s residents, being a good neighbor means, first and foremost, obeying the unwritten social contract, or the etiquette, of the Close. Of the six houses in the Close, everyone but the Kenworthys have been inhabitants since the beginning. They have all agreed to a social contract and find that when someone breaches it, it is too vague to be legally viable. Their biggest frustration is that the Kenworthys haven’t fallen in line with the contract. As May says, “The trouble with the Kenworthys is that even though they’ve been here for more than six months, they’re still behaving as if they’re new to the close and haven’t learned how to fit in with our ways” (36).