[b:Watching You|38355282|Watching You|Lisa Jewell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1545496322l/38355282._SY75_.jpg|58189380]
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 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 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!

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Okay, I love a good who-dunnit as much as the next one but sadly I found it hard to get into this one.

While the plot was intriguing enough, long simmering hurt and revenge boils over, the constant bouncing back and forth between characters and POVs took away from what could have been a great story.

The characters were okay but the writing style was a bit hard for me personally to get a good enough feel for them.

I know my review will probably not sit well with others but the over all flow of this book felt disconnected to me and hard to follow.

dnf ( )

Omg my first Lisa Jewell book I couldn't put down . I went to Bind. I didn't know what the book was about. I am going to read more books by Lisa Jewell ( )

I don’t usually enjoy psychological mysteries written by women, I often find you get far more on the emotion side of the equestrian than on the physical side, and so the stories become sanitized. Yes of course there are exceptions, one is of course Gillian Flynn, another exception is if the author is British, European, or Australian. These are truly general guidelines, but so far it has been true for me.
Watching You by Lisa Jewell is a really good story set up the way a story like this should be with lots of very plausible suspects.
I did however feel she gave too many clues too early in the book, regarding what was likely going to be the outcome.
Still this would be a good beach read this summer. ( )