I Am Watching You by Teresa Driscoll

I Am Watching You by Teresa Driscoll
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ella Longfield was on her way home on the train when she notices two young girls flirting with two men that she is sure are just out of prison. Ella is of course concerned and debates on what she should do to make sure the girls are safe. Should she call someone? Approach them? But as the trip goes on one thing leads to another and Ella finds herself home without having done anything. The next morning she awakens to see on the news that one of the girls, Anna, had gone missing the night before.

A year goes by from that fateful night with Ella still upset that she hadn’t done anything and possibly stopped Anna’s disappearance and with the girl still gone someone else decides Ella is at fault and begins sending her threatening letters. Ella hires an investigator to look into the letters and with the anniversary of the disappearance a public appeal is planned but before long it becomes clear that others are also hiding secrets about that night and just what happened to Anna.

I Am Watching You by Teresa Driscoll ended up being one of those thriller reads that to me just wasn’t as thrilling as I hoped it would be. There are a few reasons I could think of that kept me from completely becoming immersed in the story and on the edge of my seat like I prefer to be in this type of book. I thought maybe a part of that would be the simple explanation of the huge time jump shortly after the story began. Jumping a year into the future after a person goes missing seems to leave little hope for a good outcome so as much as I was still a bit curious it failed to really grab me just at that point early in the book.

Now another thing with this one that seemed to make it a bit tougher to connect to the story for me was the way the book changes the point of view between several different characters. The chapters are titled with things such as The Witness (Ella), The Father, The Friend and eventually The Private Investigator along with a couple of other POVs later in the book so as it’s switching I was struggling to match who was who and the characters were just not popping out to me and taking a life of their own. Perhaps it was the style or perhaps I just didn’t feel there was enough depth to them to really connect but it gave the story another bit of slowness to it.

In the end this one was simply one of those books that to me was just an alright read that hadn’t really grabbed me as much as I prefer. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it but more of one that I will find a bit forgettable once moving on from it since nothing really popped out to me or became overly exciting in my opinion. Perhaps other will enjoy it a bit more than I did with the style in which it was written though.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.