Everyone is a Suspect
I picked this book up because I was given an arc of another Lisa Jewell book The Family Upstairs. If I have never read a book by an author before sometimes, I will buy something else just to become familiar with the writing style. I am so glad I did. This has to be one of the most well-written thrillers I have read in a long time.
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 neighbors. Several chapters in and I had concluded that the majority of the characters weren’t very nice people. There were a few that had like-ability 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 neighbor, being watched by a neighbor, 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 behavior, 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 apparently, 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 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 impressive and memorable Run, don’t walk, to read it!
