My love for Alyssa Cole is well established and I truly think she can write anything but this book blew me away! I know people are going to say wow this book is so timely…and yes; it’s so timely – but not because of the massive protests happening this summer, or the micro and macro aggressions that are being filmed and rightly passed around, or the horrors of police brutality, but because racial injustice and inequality has always been timely in America.
What made this thriller so overwhelmingly scary to me is that genuinely I felt like at least 80% of it could actually happen. What I love about Alyssa Cole’s writing is that she manages to encapsulate so much into such a short time. She wraps up real history and romantic elements with racism and gentrification and somehow made it work.
This book is solidly NOT a romance but when I say Alyssa Cole can do anything, I mean it. When No One is Watching is a gentrification thriller about Sydney who is coping with a lot of stress in her life and Theo who is dealing with a complicated relationship and background he’d like to hide.
This is a thriller that truly kept me on the edge of my seat. I don’t read a lot of suspense with my eyeballs but I listen to a ton of them and I cannot wait to listen to this one. And honestly most of the thrillers I listen to are ones I can guess the endings. I had no freaking clue what was going to happen with this. Some things I guessed but others I was like uh, what? The pacing was phenomenal in the way it kept me on my toes but was balanced enough that it allowed me to take a breath where necessary.
I would recommend this for fans of suspense or anyone who loves Alyssa Cole’s writing and is willing to try out another genre besides romance. But if you’re truly only a romance reader I might skip it because this may not be for you. Or if you are not a fan of scary I might skip as well because there are some areas that may freak you out. I’d recommend going into it relatively cold because the surprises are genuinely better that way.
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