Book Review
Title: When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole
Genre: Mystery, Thriller
Rating: 5 Stars
I didn’t know anything about When No One is Watching before getting into it but it was a part of my Goodreads Reading Challenge and I am finally getting to it almost ten months after starting the challenge. We are introduced to Sydney who has grown up in Gifford Place, a stable Black community that has been steadily changing for the worst as people are moving out and the people replacing them aren’t the kind of people Sydney is used to interacting with and it shows. Sydney is dealing with a lot at this moment in her life, her mother’s failing health, her failed marriage and she is also unemployed right now. To distract herself she takes a local tour of the neighbourhood but becomes enraged when she realises the tour guide only talks about the white history of the neighbourhood and after interrupting a few times is essentially asked to leave. However, during this tour is accidently meets Theo and his girlfriend, Kim who have recently moved into the neighbourhood and she is also being pressured to sell her family home which she isn’t willing to do. Theo, on the other hand, seems like the kind of person Sydney would get along with but Kim definitely isn’t. Their relationship has been on the rocks for a while since Kim cheated on Theo and buying a house together he realises was a very bad idea as he can’t leave now or he will end up in debt and scrambling for a place to live but he can’t stand to be around Kim most of the time.
Through Theo’s perspective we see that Kim is a little racist as she often plays her white privilege card against the black community and even threatens to call the police on a woman in the grocery store who was affronted that Kim cut in front of her despite being clearly visible to everyone else around her and Theo despises this but he feels that he can’t say anything given the state of their relationship right now. Theo decides to attend the community block party meeting where he officially meets Sydney for the first time and we can see they are attracted to each other but the tensions in the neighbourhood especially with Kim might keep them apart. After returning home, Kim is entertaining a few neighbours, Terry and Josie and along with Kim they humiliate Theo bringing his joblessness and his relationship problem into the conversation as well as trying to coerce him into believing that the neighbourhood is dangerous and something needs to be done about. When Theo leaves the house he is paranoid and being jumped by a young black man presumably struggling with addiction doesn’t help this nor does the police attitude towards them. Upon returning home he notices Kim leaving with an overnight bag to go to David’s, the man she cheated on Theo with and rather than confronting her he just accepts it. The only upside to his life right now is that he agreed to help Sydney with her tour idea that she plans to test run during the block party in a week’s time and his fantasies of her which seem more real now he has met her properly.
As we continue to follow Sydney and Theo through the normal interaction of their lives we can see both are struggling to deal with the paranoia bearing down on them for different reasons. For Sydney she is seeing her community dissolve before her eyes as people move away and young people like Preston, a promising young boy, get arrested. She is also dealing with lawyers, debt collectors, realtors and things for her own past that she doesn’t want to confront yet but they seem to be appearing everywhere to haunt her. Meanwhile Theo is struggling with his relationship and his growing attraction to Sydney but he wonders often if he is letting Kim paranoia about the neighbourhood get to him too despite his efforts to shrug it off. The chapters and perspective changes are broken up by little snippets from the neighbourhood app where we can see more clearly the divide between those that have always lived in the neighbourhood and those that have recently moved into the neighbourhood and the idea of gentrification is born into the novel as the original community feel more and more pressure to confront to the new ideals or to leave the neighbourhood all together since rent prices and tax are going up and it is becoming unaffordable for some to live there. In the case of Preston’s family they may have to sell their home in order to keep their son out of prison from something he wasn’t involved with in the first place. If that isn’t a social commentary on what has been happening in recent years then I don’t know what is. Cole’s writing style so far is simple and pleasant to read but this is labelled as a thriller and I am waiting to see where those elements come into play and I am also waiting to see where the growing attraction between Sydney and Theo goes giving they are from two different sides of the community whether they want to be or not.
As Theo and Sydney continue their research together for Sydney’s tour we learn more about the community of Gifford Place both historically and in the present but strange things are beginning to happen. It started with the strange uber driver, who now turns up at Sydney’s door as a fake utilities man only to be run off by Theo. This man either has something to do with Sydney’s past, the debt she is in or it could be something to do with the mysterious pharmaceutical company that is moving into the neighbourhood in the near future but right now we don’t know. Theo has also been witnessing some strange things as he thinks he saw some men break into the apartment of an elderly neighbour but the next morning people say he is in the hospital visiting one of his grandchildren and as Theo was drunk at the time he can’t trust what he saw not to be a drunken hallucination but it just doesn’t feel right. Both Sydney and Theo’s lives are spiralling out of control as Kim leaves Theo and orders him to move out of the house or she is going to set her very expensive lawyers onto him despite the fact his name is on the mortgage and she doesn’t even offer him a buy out meaning he has a week to find somewhere new to live which is going to be difficult been as he is currently unemployed because he lied on his resume making him virtually unemployable and he has nothing in savings.
Life is becoming even worse for Theo and Sydney as bit by bit the neighbourhood is being taken over and from the small inserts we see it seems like the takeover has been planned for a long time and they have plans for the neighbourhood for the next fifteen years. Sydney’s best friend has also been caught up in it as she works for the company behind it and had a huge payoff when Sydney returned to the neighbourhood and now she has disappeared. Sydney’s low point is when the community garden is reclaimed by the “owner” even though her mother has been the owner of the plot for years and everything is torn up. Theo obviously learns about this and rushes to Sydney’s side where they decide to be honest with each other for the first time. Theo confesses he lost his job not because he lied but because he tried stealing from his clients and was blacklisted which is why he can’t find another job. Sydney confesses about her mother’s debt and how she has been left with it but the worst thing about the situation is that her mother is buried in the garden which she can’t get access to anymore. Although no more strange men have arrived and the harassment Sydney was getting from the realtors has died down, the race element is only becoming more and more aggressive and I am not sure how the novel is going to wrap this up or where the real thriller element comes in.
Suddenly things start coming together as both Sydney and Theo realise that everything is connected from the realtors to the new company moving to people leaving all of a sudden. However, Sydney misunderstands the situation and believes that Theo is involved with them when it was actually Kim was in deep. She leaves his home only for him to call her telling her that someone has entered her building and is coming for her. She hides in the old servant staircase where she finds the dead body of her best friend, murdered by the company for leaking information. Theo catches up with her but she believes that he is still involved until the real killer makes an appearance. Together Theo and Sydney are able to kill the man and realise that the people behind this are planning something similar to what happened years before but before they can do anything the lights go out and chaos ensues. Honestly brining in these elements so late into the novel actually made me like it more as we really got to know Sydney and Theo are characters before any of the conspiracy and thriller elements were introduced. Now that they have been introduced fully I was wondering how Cole was going to wrap this novel up in less than 60 pages given all the loose ends we have right now but I was excited to see it.
The final section of When No One is Watching was amazing, it really made this a five star read for me as we see all the little bits and pieces of information come together and we realise how large the plan was for the gentrification. Seeing Theo and Sydney become badass fighters while retaining all of their humanity and prejudices was amazing as it made them feel real and fully fleshed out. The ending was left open either for a potential sequel or to leave it up to the reader to decide what happened next but overall I found it to be a fast paced, easy to read thriller that hit all of the right spots for me as a reader. Thrillers are tricky genre as the tropes tend to be overused and the plots don’t feel original, When No One is Watching however, felt brilliant it combined some of the best elements from movies like The Purge and Get Out to the point where I devoured the entire thing in a single sitting. Highly recommended!
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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