Member Reviews

Lisa Jewell knows how to write domestic thrillers her readers will devour in one sitting - this is no exceptions. Fans and newcomers alike will enjoy this latest offering. A first-buy for collections where thrillers or Jewell's previous books are popular.

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4-5 stars. I've wanted to read a book by Jewel, because so many love her books and now understand exactly why. She has a way of pulling you into the books and hanging on until the very end. I thought this was a good thriller that made you need to know exactly what happened and who did it!
Will highly recommend and use in a daily challenge in Chapter Chatter Pub, after my vacation.

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Ho. Ly. Crap.
This book was so insane and intricate... the synopsis alone made me extremely skeptical before I'd even gotten into it because I didn't see how so much could be going on and come together in a way that wasn't tiring or dry or dull or falling flat.
But the payoff!
The payoff!
This book was amazing, it never lulled and kept my attention nonstop
I stayed intrigued and needed, absolutely needed to know what was going on
Each characters perspective had me captivated, all the different pieces coming together as the reader learns new information made this such a wild ride as you began to understand more and more what was going on, so much shock, and "oh my god" moments, "oh no" "oh fk"
GOD WHAT IN THE WORLD I am entranced by this authors mind and the way she can write such deep, twisting stories.

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This book was right up my alley so I was very thrilled to have the chance to read an advanced copy. The main character is Joey, who along with her new husband, live with her married brother and his wife in their fancy house in a nice English neighborhood. Joey barely knows her brother's wife, Rebecca, who is kind of a blank slate and seems to have little to no personality. Joey and her husband are already on the rocks, and neither of them have jobs that are going anywhere. So it is no surprise that she develops on crush on a neighbor, Tom, who lives with his wife Nicola and their son, Freddie, in a house down the road. Tom has domestic issues of his own. His son enjoys spying on all the neighbors and his wife seems really moody and to have no direction in her life, either.

There are also other characters who get their own chapters, but these ancillary characters seem to exist only to move the plot forward. The author uses one of my favorite literary devices; interspersing the chapters with transcribed police interviews from an investigation into the murder of one of the characters in the book, whose identity is not revealed until nearly the end.

I enjoyed this book and found the short chapters made it really easy to get back into the story after putting the book down. I definitely did not see some of the twists coming, and the author did a great job misdirecting the reader as to who was murdered, who did it, and what their motive was. Overall, this was a solid mystery novel that touched on elements of autism, stalking, mental illness, bullying, adultery, and teachers who may have too much interest in their students. Now, that list of topics is not a spoiler, because some of those topics actually occur in the book and others just appear to exist and turn out to not occur at all. To find out which is which you have to read the book!

*Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my advanced reader's copy in exchange for an honest review!*

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4.5 STARS

I always feel like somebody's watching me...

A picturesque street in a nice neighborhood in England. Painted pastel houses with cozy surroundings. Behind closed doors, someone is watching...

Tom Fitzwilliam, the headmaster at a local school is a husband, a father, and a rather flirty guy who knows he has a way with the women.

Joey Mullen and her husband Alfie, have just moved in with her brother so they can get their lives sorted. Joey is going through a bit of a crisis in her marriage, when she meets Tom and is suddenly and unexpectedly obsessed with him. Timing is everything, if it hadn't been him, maybe it would have been someone else?

When someone is found murdered, everyone has an opinion about who is responsible and past secrets are starting to come to light.

One of my favorite parts of the story is the recorded police interviews that are dispersed throughout the book, giving clues to who is suspected and where the investigation is focusing. I kept trying to figure out Tom and figure out if he was misunderstood or just another cagey predator.

I was able to figure out the first twist, but that was due to the clever hints that Jewell laid out in the previous chapters. This was an intriguing character driven mystery that had me diagnosing all the characters at every turn.

The last twist comes in the last paragraph and was quite a stunner!

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Alfie and his wife Joey have just moved into a neighborhood she has always envied. They are staying with Joey's brother Jack and his wife Rebecca, until Alfie finds a job. Joey meets a neighbor, respected Tom Fitzwilliam a local school teacher and develops an infatuation for him. She watches him whenever she can, unaware that someone is also watching her. Twenty years previously, a student writes in her diary about a teacher named Mr. Fitzwilliam. The Fitzwilliam family move a lot and their son Freddie has taken to watching his new neighbors and documenting their movements. A body is discovered which links Joey to the scene, but all is not as it seems - could infatuation lead to murder?
Thanks to the publishers for sending me an ARC for my honest review.

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As a fan of Lisa Jewel, I really enjoyed this story and consider one of her best books. It started out a little slow for me, but I was finally hooked in and couldn’t put it down. A story that makes you feel,like you, yourself are eavesdropping on neighbors who all have some type of secret.

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In the Melville Heights neighborhood everyone seems to have a "eye" out for secrets while they don't realize their own are being discovered. The story almost needs a program due to the character list but minus that the story does hum along and keep you interested.

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Thank you for the advanced copy of this book. My reviews can be found on my GoodReads page at https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1335387-kelly.

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I am a huge fan of Lisa Jewel books. She mixes the best of mystery/thriller with women’s fiction!!! Watching You followed her amazing story telling pattern.
Melville Heights is the neighborhood everyone wants to live in. Bristol England’s elite live there, so it is not a place where people get murdered. But it is defiantly the place where everyone has secrets and everyone is “watching you”……..
I really enjoyed Watching You and I look forward to reading more from Lisa!

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This was SOME book. And what an ending! Don't wa t to ruin it for future readers, but whatever you do, DONT miss this one. One of the best books I've ever read! Highly recommend

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I really enjoy Lisa Jewell's novels, and this was no exception.

The large cast of characters is tied together with their location on a gorgeous street in Bristol, and slowly we begin to understand that all is not what it seems in this neighborhood.

I found it fascinating how the perspectives shifted, and, unlike so many other books, none were disappointing. So often I found myself convinced of something only to feel completely differently in a few pages.

The book is a mystery and has many twists an turns to keep readers guessing.

If you are new to Lisa Jewell, this is a great place to start.

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First of, huge thank you's to Netgalley and the publisher for this advanced copy! I'm a huge fan of Lisa Jewell, so I couldn't wait to get my hands on this book. It was extremely well written, and probably my favorite written by her that I've read so far. The book was suspenseful and kept me guessing until almost the very end. I was shocked by the ending of the book! I'm anxious for it to come out in December so everyone else can get a chance to read it!!

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I received an excerpt of this book from Netgalley and I enjoyed what I had read and was thrilled to be able to read the rest of the book. It was so easy to get caught up in this very addicting story where you knew the multiple families were going to eventually collide but when and to what extent? A super suspenseful and intriguing read!

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I choose to read this story as I absolutely loved the author's previous novel, Then She Was Gone, which then led me to read and love I Found You as well. Unfortunately I didn't care for this story. I felt the plot to be slow and the characters just didn't shine through for me. It was a page-turner in the sense that I couldn't wait for the story to come to a twist, however it never did and I saw everything that was coming.

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Thank you to NetGalley, Lisa Jewell and Atria Books for this ARC.

This is my first Lisa Jewell book, and I am so mad at myself for not reading her sooner! I really enjoyed this book. It was well written, and the pacing of the book was good. I was hooked from the very first chapter.

I am definitely a new Lisa Jewell fan, and will be reading all her other books as quickly as I can!

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This book starts with you knowing that a crime has been committed. You have to unravel all the strings to figure it out. There are a lot of characters to keep track of. We have a school headmaster who might just be too good to be true. A physician and his remote wife. Several teenagers with obsessions. A Mother who has emotional issues. There are chapters throughout the book that are police interviews with different characters.

This book dragged a bit for me at the beginning. You have to pay attention to keep everyone straight. Overall it was a good plot with an unexpected twist at the end. Thank you to net galley for an advanced readers copy.

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I've read and enjoyed several Lisa Jewell novels in the last two years. When an opportunity to read Watching You surfaced last month, I requested the book via NetGalley and was awarded it overnight. I was super excited and planned it for my October schedule so I could have a little scary / psychological stuff to read as the temperature got chillier and the sun set earlier. Overall, I was pleased with the book and would recommend it, but there were a few things that needed some additional attention before the final version was released to readers.

The story takes place in current times in an English village where several of the neighbors have a penchant for watching one another through binoculars, cameras, or even just between the separation of curtains in a window. There are ~20 important cast members' lives we read about and try to understand who's connected to who when they say things using generic names like "she" or "he" to keep us in suspense. There's a newlywed couple, a couple with a baby on the way, a couple fighting, a mother and daughter who act weird, young teen friends who are hooking up with boys they shouldn't be, a teen boy who is a bit peculiar at first (then we learn why)... all-in-all, it's a fine cast with lots of potential but no one was superb or lovable or hate-able (my new word of the day!). As we understand the connections and who's misbehaving, we begin to see how everything unravels until the big twist at about 90% in the book.

Unfortunately, I thought it was too easy to guess. That doesn't mean it wasn't good, but I believe it could have used some more mystery, red herrings, and darker tones. Additionally, several characters were manipulated to create red herrings (which I'm totally cool with) but the end of their story and the root cause of why it happened wasn't really sewn back together. I don't believe it was purposeful either, just not enough focus on total symmetry across the entire novel. Because of this and a few characters who weren't as fleshed out as I thought they should be (Rebecca, mother of girl who took lots of photos, the group that met at the house), I couldn't give it 5 stars.

The plot was strong, the characters were passionate. The dialog and descriptions were vivid and consistent. Rarely did I find myself tempted to skim/skip a few paragraphs. It was just missing something to make it really really pop. This is a genre I really love diving into, so it certainly met a lot of my go-to features but fell shy of where Jewell's books normally take me. It has a few difficult stories to handle (I'm okay with them, but others might be alarmed) such as child abuse, spouse abuse, possible rape, affairs, teacher/student relationships being crossed. It's almost as if the book wanted to cross a heavy line into being stark and scary, but it stopped too short to be a total dark psychological thriller and went too far to just say it gently handled these situations. We were in the middle and uncertain which way to gravitate on whether a character was black or white... several were muted grey in their tendencies and behaviors.

For me, in a book, it wavered too much. It's probably very reminiscent of reality, but I wanted a bigger gut punch or a lighter hint at misbehavior. An example is the spouse abuse. One says "nothing is happening" and the other says "yes, we occasionally hurt one another" -- I'm paraphrasing. We never get a real answer, so I'm uncertain why it was left that way when it was (1) not critical to the plot and (2) made us waffle on how we were supposed to interpret what was going on. Given the actual people involved were critical to the murder that happened, I felt we needed something more transparent.

That said, it's still a very strong book. I will keep reading more from Jewell. And if you can accept these things, and still enjoy a great story, you'll be fine with this one.

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One of the best books I have read in 2018, I will most definitely will be reading more books by Lisa Jewel . Thanks NetGalley.

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4.5 Stars: Watching You by Lisa Jewell

After reading Then She was Gone earlier this year, liked it did not love it, I knew that Lisa Jewell would be an author on my radar. Though the plot was not my favorite in her last book, her writing style is a style I enjoy reading. Watching You, in my opinion, was better than TSWG. There are more characters to keep up with, but there is only one I would honestly say was not necessary.

From page one, there is a murder and we know that it will not be the obvious choice-- or will it? And though I figured out some of the ending by 60% of the book some of it took me by surprise. The plot is well written and though it's a quick read, you cannot breeze past the details. Because all of the answers are in those tiny details. Watching You was a page turner and I truly enjoyed it. Would recommend to those who like suspense novels. Definitely a solid read.

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