Watching You

This was my second read and I have learned my lesson – just forget about moving from your seat for ANY Reason as it is pointless to do so, because Lisa Jewell Hooks you in very quickly and so just accept that nothing will get done until you read the last syllable!

The opening chapter sees a policewoman processing a crime scene. An unidentified person lies dead on the kitchen floor. We then rewind to two months earlier and cover the weeks leading up to the murder, with intermittent flash-forwards to police interviews with various neighbours. Several chapters in and I had concluded that the majority of the characters weren’t very nice people. There were a few that had likeability potential, others I just felt plain sorry for, and two in particular that frankly made my skin crawl. It also became clear early on that almost every character was either watching a neighbour, being watched by a neighbour, or sometimes both. They lurked in bushes, took photographs, recorded video, used binoculars, looked in windows, followed one another, and bumped into each other on purpose. Disturbing behaviour, right? At least that’s what I thought… Then the last half of the book pretty much took everything I thought I knew and threw it out the window. Lisa Jewell is the queen of misdirection, and I’m the sucker that fell for it. I still can’t get over how wrong I was. And that last page – man-oh-man, so good! Aside from edge-of-your-seat crime suspense the author always succeeds at injecting a lot of emotion and heart into her stories. I admit to tearing up a couple of times. ‘Watching You’ is every bit as impressive and memorable as ‘Then She Was Gone’ in my book. Run, don’t walk, to read it!

Neighbors can be the nicest. And the creepiest. Sure, they are good for a cup of sugar. Or taking your mail in when you’re on vacation. But if they are of the peeping Tom variety or get a little too close for comfort and you’re not ready to put the house on the market, what’s a neighbor to do? Exactly. In Lisa Jewell’s newest novel WATCHING YOU, everyone is perfectly cozy in the posh neighborhood when young newlywed Joey and her husband come home to live temporarily with her brother and his pregnant wife. It’s all fine and dandy until they meet handsome neighbor Tom, super star teacher and his sort of weirdo wife and teenage son. Jewell keeps readers, along with the rest of the neighborhood, looking over their shoulders with this sinister, who’s coming out tonight so engaging thriller.

Finally a thriller that lives up to its billing! Within one chapter, I knew I was ready for an all-night read of WATCHING YOU. Set in an area of Bristol, England, this is the tale of charismatic, yet creepy Headmaster Tom Fitzwilliam, those who love him, those who loathe him and those who fear him. What is it about Tom that is so magnetic, wonders Joey Mullen, who with her new husband, moves in with her brother and sister-in-law two doors away. He is nearly twice Joey’s age and yet she feels an instant, almost sexual attraction to him. Little does she know that Freddie, Tom’s teenage son, is secretly recording her every interaction with his father. Jenna Tripp, on the other hand, is unsettled by Tom. A student at his school, she is discomforted by his seemingly inappropriate relationship with Bess, her best friend. Jenna grows so concerned that she finds herself becoming friendless. As if this weren’t enough for the young teen, Jenna is the daughter of a paranoid mother, who is convinced that Tom is stalking her. Added to the cast of characters are Tom’s enigmatic wife, Nicole; women from his past; Joey’s young husband, Alfie; her brother; and an old diary. Oh, and a violent crime scene! Working backward from the bloody crime scene, Lisa Jewell spins a tale filled with intricate twists. Just when I thought I had put the puzzle together, the pieces no longer fit. WATCHING YOU is an old-fashioned whodunnit; in fact, I had to reread the epilogue and am still shaking my head. Her characters are…characters, every one drawn so vividly. Despite the intricacies of the plot, the story is straightforward. No weird Quentin Tarantino-esque time travel; no interchanging first person points-of-view – these vehicles for storytelling are getting tiresome for me. Lisa Jewell has been a favorite of mine since I read her first book. WATCHING YOU might be her best work yet.

I hate to give a book that\’s not flat out horrible a less than stellar review, but I\’m not sure how I feel about this book. I\’m still thinking about it a few days after finishing it, and would kind of like to discuss it with a book club or something, but on the other hand, I did not enjoy reading it. I kind of stuck with it out of curiosity, but I knew early on that I was displeased. It did have some wicked, rather unexpected twists in the second half of the story On the other hand, I felt like it had some holes in the plot to make those twists possible. In the end, I feel like it would have been a very good, very interesting novella of about 100 pages, not a 300+ page novel. I realized there would be trouble when I got to Chapter 16 (the chapters are short, but still…) and pretty much all that had happened was that we\’d established that everybody thought the head teacher man was sexy and possibly a little dangerous. Reading it kind of felt like I was in on a bunch of small town gossip, not a plot that was hopefully moving forward. (WARNING….Potential spoilers ahead, but I\’ll be as vague as possible… ) The end was fairly surprising and disturbing, and almost very good. But then, in the final twist, if the item in the envelope got there the way we\’d have to deduce it did, how did that happen, considering that the most recently deceased person who put it in the envelope was portrayed to have always been (and clearly still was) only a weak bully who got others to do the dirty work? I cannot reconcile this and feel like I\’m missing something? I don\’t know. Three stars because it had enough of something that I\’m still thinking about it, and because of the twists. Overall, though, just not thrilled with the experience of this book.

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