The Beginning was slow and the switching between first and third person was unnerving, but not in the good suspenseful way. Having stalking, a miscarriage, flower shop, babies, a Spanish showdown, childhood sexual assault, suicide attempts, insinuated pedophilia etc felt incredibly oversaturated and lacked a focus on the real story. Despite all these events we didn’t really get to know any characters very well or importantly the murderer. The murderer was quite simply a side character until the very end which in my opinion is odd. There was no attempt to leave a trail of clues or a motive to explain the process, the event of the murder was almost thrown in at the end as a side thought despite being the main narrative focus.
The narrative itself was heavily disjointed, each chapter ends in a tiny cliffhanger. This was something that annoyed me a lot in the beginning and why it took me so long to finish the book. You’d finally get somewhere with the investigation then we’re thrown back into petty life affairs that seemed unnecessary. I’m hoping that maybe I missed the purpose of the staggered narrative but it really was the bane of my life while reading. I also didn't understand the obsession with flowers, yes Ella owns a flower shop and the author seemingly knows a lot about flowers but was it really necessary? Breaking up the flow to talk about how nice the bridal flowers were just did not work and could have been left out all together.
Overall the book only gets a 2/5, while yes this is most likely down to my structure preferences , it just didn’t deliver in the ways that I had hoped.
If you have read the book, please share some of your thoughts as I would love to hear what you thought.
Waterstones: https://www.waterstones.com/book/i-am-watching-you/teresa-driscoll/9781542046596
