Watching You

by Lisa Jewel
Atria     2019
324 pages     Thriller

One day while I was reading Watching You  by Lisa Jewel, I observed a man drive slowly by our house and then stop and take a picture of the house. I freaked out! I was way involved in Watching You  where everyone is watching or stalking everyone else, and my imagination took over! In fact, it was much more mundane than that--an appraiser, for a refi on our house.

Lisa Jewel does a masterful job of character development and suspense in her creation of a neighborhood full of secrets. Several of the characters take turns leading the plot forward as well as becoming suspects in a murder whose victim is hard to anticipate. The setting is Melville,  a colorful, closeknit, Victorian neighborhood in Briston. Newly married to Alfie, Joey has just arrived iin the community to live with  her brother and his wife, who welcome them into their home. They live a couple of doors down from the Fitzwilliams--Tom, the esteemed principal of the neighborhood high school, Nicola his much younger wife, and Freddy, a voyeur teenaged son, who documents all the neighbors with his photographic binoculars. Jenna and her psychotic mother live nearby. Jenna goes to the school where Fitzwilliams is the principal, but she is enduringly suspicious of the principal.

One of the unique aspects of Watching You is that everyone is a voyeur. Jenna's mother watches everyone because she is sure everyone is out to get her and her daughter. Her Internet conspiricy theorists feed her neuroses and paranoia. Freddy, on the other hand, is trying to chronicle all the events in the lives of the young girls in the neighborhood. The cover illustration of windows is totally appropriate and totally telling.      
                       
The reader is given clues about the victim and the murderer, but the clues are opaque, which causes the suspense to build. We delve into the histories of each of the main characters, but most of the suspicion focuses on Joey, who seems to know something about the murder. Each of the other characters also have their own moments of suspicion, but I was about three-quarters through the book before I put the whole picture together. Great plot development!

Lisa Jewel is the author of several mysteries, so the appearance of Watching You came with great anticipation. It was the first of her mysteries that I had read, but I am eager to read another. Here is her website.