Lily lives with her writer husband Adam in their modern apartment, minus the usual trappings of children and pets. It’s a quiet life, despite the teeming masses of humanity that share the apartment complex with them. It is the coming and going of the other residents, plus those across the street also, that compels Lily to obsessively people watch. Likening her new hobby to “birding”, Lily becomes more and more immersed in being the unseen observer and becomes more organized in her approach to her daily observations.

Creating a population chart for her complex is just the start. Pretending she is a doctor, in order to get the preferential slice of the buildings dodgy Wi-Fi, is another step down Lily’s personal corridor of lies and half truths. Despite being someone who prefers to remain at a distance from the lives of others, Lily finds herself immersed in a local murder mystery. Not only that, she herself becomes a suspect. Lily may have just seen too much.

You do want to Lily to succeed, as her clumsy and inept forays into investigating the murder of her neighbour are almost charming. She is a lone woman against the world and her husband Adam is of little or no help. You do feel her frustration when the efforts of others to shut her down send her into further distress and disarray. Lily is one person who truly needs to get to the truth. The red herrings are largely due to the floundering of Lily herself and the structure of the murder mystery is not that complicated; you will need to wade in and wait quite a while for the major plot twist.

The recent popular novels referenced as comparisons to THE WATCHER do lead us to suspect an unreliable narrator, and it is this that drives the reader forward in what is otherwise a slow moving novel. What did Lily actually see? What interactions has Lily really had with her suspect neighbours and what is her involvement with the murder itself? THE WATCHER struggles to keep the action moving forward, and on reflection at novel’s end it is hard to determine why it is that Lily keeps persisting.

The Watcher is narrated by Lily - an odd woman who spends her spare time spying on her neighbours and creating back stories for them. When she thinks one of her neighbours has been murdered, she sets out to find the killer, but as the reader starts to question her grip on reality we wonder... Is there someone out there, or is it in her head?
There are more twists and turns and you wonder how Lily’s mind – and body – will ever survive. Can she ever really catch the killer before he gets her? Curiosity killed the cat, will it also do for Lily?
This is an enjoyable read. Worth taking a look at.

Thank you Netgalley the Publisher and the Author for a copy of this book

I'm sorry to say that I didn't enjoy this book at all. The first-person perspective is far too limiting a narrative choice, giving us a single perspective and no external observation to help build a deeper picture. I never worked out who the journal is addressed to or why, which was distracting throughout.