The Perfect Neighborhood tackles the dark side of suburbia and what happens in close-knit neighborhoods and communities when things go wrong. This is an engrossing domestic suspense story that will shatter that picture perfect image of the cookie cutter neighborhood and neighbors who live there.

The book explores the disappearance of 5 year old Billy - who did it, who saw what, how is the neighborhood involved. The POV mostly changes between Billy's mother Rachel, his babysitter Cassidy, and his neighbor Allison (who has some drama of her own going on). The book will keep you guessing!

Would highly recommend to all lovers of domestic thrillers.

Thank you to Netgalley and Crooked Lane Books for the ARC in exchange for my honest thoughts - The Perfect Neighborhood is out 7/12/22.

The market is saturated with psychological thrillers set in a neighborhood environment lately. Some are better than others and, I am happy to say, this is one of the better ones. A kidnapping terrifies the upper middle class NJ neighborhood and causes a plethora of gossip and neighbors to suspect neighbors. When a second child is kidnapped, the neighborhood is on lock down. The plot is gripping from the start and alternating chapters told from the perspectives of multiple characters produce abundant suspense and allow readers to witness the situation through a multitude of points of view. Shorter chapters cause the plot to move along at a frenetic pace and secret after secret is revealed. The twisty plot delivers more than one surprise and the ending is both unexpected and satisfying. I look forward to reading more from this author!

Some mixed feelings on this one.

I should have read the synopsis closer. I'm a bit over the missing child trope and didn't realize it was front and center to the mystery here in this Oak Hill community.

The neighborhood is far from perfect and most characters were pretty unlikeable. I especially had a negative reaction to the rock-star husband, Chris. (view spoiler)
His wife, Allison has walked out on him and the gossip mill is having a field day. It read like a YA novel for me with a weak plot and conclusion that came out of nowhere. I won't even go into how the police handled the case.

You can expect a lot of nosy, gossipy neighbors, missing kids, a bumbling police force and fingers pointing everywhere. I'm an outlier here, but I just didn't love it. Ho-hum.

[3.5 stars].
A very gripping thriller about secrets and gossip in a tight-knit group of neighbours in suburban New Jersey.

The neighbours are gossiping that a woman has left her husband in the middle of the night and that’s all they speak about until a 5-year-old goes missing on his way home from school.

I did fly through this book and read it in one sitting, but I also did guess the ending. There were quite heavy hints about what had actually happened, and I’d worked it out before I was half way through.

It also seems to get across a message that once women become mothers, they must spend all their waking hours with their kids, never leave them and never get a babysitter? I just found this quite odd.

Regardless, this is a very good thriller - easy to read, keeps you turning the pages and full of small twists and turns throughout.

In a cozy little neighborhood, a wife leaves her husband in the middle of the night so the whole neighborhood gossips as to why they think she left. Then, a kid goes missing while he’s walking home from school. He’s in kindergarten!! Would I let my kindergartner walk home from school? No way! The whole story was about the perfect neighborhood which was not perfect and everyone just gossiped about everything. This was just ok for me. I really didn’t like any of the characters that much. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this early release in exchange for my honest review.

I received an advance review copy via Net Galley in exchange for an honest review. My honest review is that this is a decently written book. There are interesting women characters, drama, emotions and intrigue. I say women characters because the men in the book are relegated to fillers, one dimensional characters. And that is not even my issue with the book.

My problem, is the underlying message that comes across. Women, once they become mothers, should never leave their kids? Not hire babysitters for work, or any social life beyond play dates. Because no one else has the responsibility but the mom. What kind of regressive attitude is this? When a kid goes missing, mothers beat themselves up over “not following their instincts” and “going out even when the kid asked me to stay home”. They wallow in guilt over choosing to have a career. They fret about their marriage breaking up. Is this what we are telling women in 2022?

This could have been a fantastic book. It could have celebrated human connections and relationships in the suburban setting. It could have exposed the double standards without the cattishness, it could have shown how a tragic incident can strengthen a family or shatter it completely. Instead, it relies on gossip, judgement and pure meanness to get the message across.

Thank you to #netgalley for an advanced copy for an honest review. This wasn't my favorite read, I think it is because there have been a lot of "neighborhood" suspense novels lately. The suspense was ok but a little predictable and that will usually turn me off from a story, I don't like it when I can figure out the protagonist long before the end of the story.

3.5*
Did you hear? There’s a celebrity couple living among the other wealthy families in the suburb of Oak Hill. And nothing gets the gossip train rolling as much as overhearing (via the gossip channel) that Allison, the actress is leaving her nearly washed-up musician husband, Chris.

Strangely, that’s not the only disappearance in this enclave. Two children from the neighborhood also vanish. Both supposedly under the supervision of the same babysitter. Now doors are locked and curtains drawn. Everyone is giving their neighbors a second glance as they walk by.

As much as I love domestic dramas this one just didn’t quite check all the boxes. There wasn’t a single likable character…except maybe for Billy (the first child to go missing.) The interactions in the neighborhood just felt forced in order to bolster the drama.

Thanks, but I’ll just be moving down the street to another neighborhood! Hope it works better for you if you decide to drop in on Oak Hill.

Thank you to NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books

This is a hard book to review for a few reasons, but the biggest being that I was dead on about the ending. With a thriller, I love to be shocked at the ending or have a big twist at some point in the book. With this one, I felt like that was missing. I did enjoy the fast pace of this book with small twists often, but it felt like the author was setting up the ending the entire time leaving big hints. I do not want to spoil the ending, but overall I was just hoping for more.

I did give it four stars because regardless of what I didn't enjoy, I still did like this book a lot! The characters and setting were fun, who doesn't love a good neighborhood drama? Each character had a story I was invested in and had to know how they ended. The writing was wonderful and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone looking for an easy-to-read and quick thriller/mystery!

TW: There are multiple mentions of miscarriage, loss, and infertility. One scene is very detailed.

Perfect thriller - with many perfect villains!

Well written, fast paced page turner. My guess of "who dun it" changed with almost every chapter - but I definitely did not see the ending till I was reading it!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Perfect Neighborhood is your classic suburbia story of a group of neighbors and all their ‘hidden’ secrets. When 5 year old Billy goes missing walking home from school, no one can believe this could happen in their ‘safe’ neighborhood. And when another child also disappears, it really turns the neighborhood upside down.

There are a lot of characters to keep track of but it’s not confusing because the chapters rotate through the different characters’ perspectives.

A classic ‘who done it’ mystery and a reminder that we most likely don’t know as much as we think about the people living right next door to us.

Thanks to NetGalley & the publishers for this ARC! Book comes out July 2022!

This book was an engrossing domestic suspense story that was super enjoyable to read!
Not at all what I was expecting and I was pleasantly suprised.

This is a riveting thriller; it’ll keep you up for hours, desperate to know what’s happened to Billy Barnes.

Billy lives in Oak Hill, which may just possibly be the perfect neighbourhood. It’s populated with affluent, good looking people, with time to lavish on children and hobbies. Incomes are high, crime is low, schools are good, and everything looks lovely

It’s no spoiler to say that Oak Hill is in fact riven with gossip, competitiveness, spite, and envy. We discover that on page two.

The neighbourhood is having a fabulous time gossiping about the possible marriage breakdown of two of the most perfect people to live in the perfect neighbourhood. And then, abruptly, they’re not. Instead they’re focused entirely on the disappearance of little Billy Barnes. Five years old, one day Billy doesn’t make it home after school.

Now the gossip is tinged with fear, not only for Billy, but for their own children and their property values. And as her world falls apart around her, all Billy’s mother wants is her son back.

This is the sort of thriller that inspires words like “propulsive”. Because once the story gets properly into gear – and that’s on about page 5 – it’s incredibly hard to walk away from this without knowing what comes next. And the tension, and need to know, only ratchet up as the story continues.

This is a very straightforward story from a crime perspective, which is why I’d categorise it more as a thriller: the tension lies around who did it. We know what’s happened, we have a broad sense of what might follow. But we don’t know who, or exactly why. And that promotes suspicion between the characters and a good deal of tension for the readers.

The novel switches between multiple narrators, which is both good and bad. Emotionally, it engages you strongly with multiple characters and lets you see them as real people, rather than the caricatures they seem through their neighbour’s eyes. But there was perhaps one narrator too many – it got hard to keep track of some of the mothers, in particular – and towards the end it made a couple of red herrings pretty ineffective. As a result, the denouement was perhaps less of a surprise to me than Alterman had intended.

This is written in an observational style that slides easily from head to head; I particularly enjoyed the slightly distanced effect in the first chapter. The style becomes warmer as we spend more time in each character’s head, and before too long I was so caught up in the story that I didn’t notice the style anymore. It was a very easy read in that way.

There’s some acute observation of the worst of the suburbs here: relatively well off, relatively idle, women pouring their energies into the wrong things. Each is more isolated than they realise. They’re badly equipped to cope when something goes very wrong. And still they work to maintain the “perfect” exterior – not just physical appearance, but the broader presentation of things like what activities they engage in.

I really enjoyed this. Sure, I saw the end coming maybe a few chapters before I was supposed to. Even with that, this was a high tension novel nearly to the end. It’s a vivid portrait of individuals in extended crisis. It’s really well written.

Crime or thriller readers might enjoy this most, but readers of contemporary fiction will also find a lot to appreciate. Give it a chance; most readers will be mesmerised before the end of the first chapter.

The Perfect Neighborhood
By: Liz Alterman
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
4.5 Stars

This was a thrilling read. I really enjoy this trope, nice neighborhood, secrets and scandals. I also really enjoy books with multiple POV! The writing style was good!

Thank you to Crooked Lane Books and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news but I truly didn't enjoy this book. In my opinion, there were too many narrators that didn't have different enough voices that, even though the narrator is stated at the beginning of the chapter, I often found myself getting lost and not able to figure out who was actually narrating (or remembering which name was which character) until it started talking about unique details of family life and such. I really liked the original premise of you never know what is going on behind closed doors in your own neighborhood but, in my opinion, it fell extremely flat. I was also able to figure out the culprit fairly early on and there weren't very many twists and turns on the way to getting there. Had promise but, in my opinion, didn't live up to it.

The Perfect Neighborhood
By: Liz Alterman
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
This is a thrilling whodunit! I enjoyed the authors writing style, but it was a little too character driven for my personal taste that seemed to bog down the story in places. Regardless of that, I love small town suburban stories where the town appears ‘to go to be true’ on the surface and discovering the secrets that lurk within them. The satisfying conclusion wrapped the story up nicely. I will definitely read another book by this author. ****4-Stars****

This books is for all the fans (myself included) of the trope of perfect neighbourhoods hiding imperfections and perfect secrets. Told from the perspective of multiple characters, it is an enjoyable domestic suspense thriller that will get your fingers turn the pages fast.

When actress and model, Allison Langley leaves her rockstar husband. It’s all the Oak Hill neighbours talk about. But when five-year-old Billy goes missing on his walk home from kindergarten, the gossip switches to the disappearance of Billy. Who could have taken Billy? Now another child goes missing. The town gets put under a microscope while the police try to solve the disappearances.

I love the whole ‘neighbourhood scandal’ stories, so I was really excited to have my request approved for this!

This book is told in 5 different POVs. But the way it was written in longer chapters, it’s not confusing at all. I was hooked from the beginning. I wanted to know what happened to Billy! I was on the edge of my seat, there was so much happening with all the characters that I couldn’t read the book fast enough.

i’ve seen a new trend that’s been happening for a wee while now: books about the perfect neighborhood, the perfect family, the not so perfect family, etc. i’m in no way using that to judge this book, seeing as it’s what drew me into it in the first place. i’m loving seeing these well to do towns have a crisis. it reaffirms that despicable acts can happen even in the nicest of areas.

the perfect neighborhood includes famous actors, washed up musicians, and well of families. everything i could’ve ask for and more.

very few of the characters in this book were likeable. everyone has something to hide. and i can’t complain, because i love reading about rich people.

while i didn’t connect with the characters, i loved the writing style. everything flowed nicely and swiftly. i started this book and found i couldn’t put it down. the author definitely has a talent – this won’t be the last of her books that i read.

that aside, the plot was rather lacking. it was like reading gossip girl, where you get immersed in pointless gossip and forget that there should be a plot. the perfect neighborhood is easily a character driven book, as most of the plot twists and reveals happened in the last 10%. there was little build up, or clues as to what was going to unfold.

so yes, 90% of this book was relatively boring. kids disappear, but there’s no clues to lead you anywhere. but the writing really carried this book. i read it in one sitting – and couldn’t put it down. (i should clarify, that by “boring”, i mean uneventful).

all in all, this book managed to keep my interests where many others seem to fail. props to liz alterman for keeping me hooked while nothing happened! i wish more books were written like this.

I couldn't put down this excellent thriller! Oak Hill may seem perfect on the surface but appearances can be deceiving. I really liked that this novel focused not only on women living in Oak Hill but also on a former resident.The twist at the end of the book is one that the reader will not see coming!