Watching You: A Novel

by Lisa Jewell

Genres: Women's Fiction; Domestic Thrillers

Synopsis

New York Times and number-one Sunday Times best-selling author and “brilliant storyteller” (Shelf Awareness, starred review) Lisa Jewell weaves another suspenseful thriller about a shocking murder in a picturesque and well-to-do English town, perfect for fans of Big Little Lies.

Melville Heights is one of the nicest neighborhoods in Bristol, England. It’s the sort of place where doctors and lawyers and old-money academics live. It’s not the sort of place where people get stabbed in the back 30 times with a kitchen knife in their own homes.

Someone must have seen something.

Newlywed Joey Mullen, for example, recently returned from four years of working in Ibiza. She and her husband, Alfie, are eager to find a place of their own in her hometown. But Joey finds herself distracted by the man next door, Tom Fitzwilliam. He’s the principal of the local high school, twice her age, and devastatingly attractive. What starts as an innocent infatuation soon escalates into fixation, and before long, Joey can’t keep her eyes off of Tom.

Or the principal’s son, Freddie, who dreams of working as a spy and has been developing his surveillance skills by keeping meticulous logs of the coming and goings in the area. And, as he approaches his 15th birthday, his attention — and his lens — are turning more and more toward the local women.

Or perhaps single mother Frances Tripp, who has long been convinced she is being stalked. Her teenage daughter, Jenna, is worried these delusions are signs of her mother’s deteriorating mental health, particularly now that her paranoia has found a specific target: Tom Fitzwilliam. Frances is determined to keep an eye on him until she can prove he is behind her persecution.

Twenty years earlier, a schoolgirl writes in her diary, charting her doomed obsession with a handsome young English teacher named Mr. Fitzwilliam.

Nobody knows why this horrific murder was committed, but someone in Melville Heights knows who did it. As the community’s fearful eyes turn on each other, the question remains:

Who else is watching?

Release date: December 26, 2018

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 337

Sample

Watching You

PROLOGUE

MARCH 24

DC Rose Pelham kneels down; she can see something behind the kitchen door, just in front of the trash can. For a minute she thinks it’s a bloodstained twist of tissue, maybe, or an old bandage. Then she thinks perhaps it is a dead flower. But as she looks at it more closely she can see that it’s a tassel. A red suede tassel. The sort that might once have been attached to a handbag, or to a boot.

It sits just on top of a small puddle of blood, strongly suggesting that it had fallen there in the aftermath of the murder. She photographs it in situ from many angles, and then, with her gloved fingers, she plucks the tassel from the floor and drops it into an evidence bag, which she seals.

She stands up and turns to survey the scene of the crime: a scruffy kitchen, old-fashioned pine units, a green Aga piled with pots and pans, a large wooden table piled with table mats and exercise books and newspapers and folded washing, a small extension to the rear with a cheap timber glazed roof, double doors to the garden, a study area with a laptop, a printer, a shredder, a table lamp.

It’s an innocuous room, bland even. A kitchen like a million other kitchens all across the country. A kitchen for drinking coffee in, for doing homework and eating breakfast and reading newspapers in. Not a kitchen for dark secrets or crimes of passion. Not a kitchen for murdering someone in.

But there, on the floor, is a body, splayed facedown inside a large, vaguely kidney-shaped pool of blood. The knife that had been used is in the kitchen sink, thoroughly washed down with a soapy sponge. The attack on the victim had been frenzied: at least twenty knife wounds to the neck, back, and shoulders. But little in the way of blood has spread to other areas of the kitchen—no handprints, no smear, no spatters—leading Rose to the conclusion that the attack had been unexpected, fast, and efficient and that the victim had had little chance to put up a fight.

Rose takes a marker pen from her jacket pocket and writes on the bag containing the red suede tassel.

Description: “Red suede/suedette tassel.”

Location: “In front of fridge, just inside door from hallway.”

Date and time of collection: “Friday, March 24, 2017, 11:48 p.m.”

It’s probably nothing, she muses, just a thing fallen from a fancy handbag. But nothing was often everything in forensics.

Nothing could often be the answer to the whole bloody thing.