Synopsis:
Eight years ago, Grace McMullen broke Sutton Whitlock’s heart when she walked away from their relationship. It wasn’t because she didn’t love him. It was to save him from the baggage of her own troubled past, and her inability to settle down and give him the life he dreamed about.
Now all she wants is to make sure he’s okay.
Everything she’s learned about him online tells her he has never gotten over her. According to his social media accounts, he’s living in her hometown, married to a look-alike, and named his daughter Grace. Obviously, he hasn’t moved on. In fact, Grace concludes it’s creepy.
So Grace does what any concerned ex-girlfriend would do: she comes home for a visit . . . and watches him.
Soon Grace crosses paths with Sutton’s wife, Campbell, and they develop an unexpected friendship. Grace is sure that Campbell has no idea whom she’s inviting into her life.
As the women grow closer, it becomes clear to Grace that Sutton is no longer the easy-going, sentimental man she knew. He seems to have grown controlling, unstable . . . and threatening. Grace can only imagine what a broken man like Sutton is capable of, and becomes convinced that it is up to her to save Campbell and her baby.
But while Grace has been watching them, who’s been watching her?
Review:
Minka Kent says she has always been curious about good people who do bad things and loves to explore what happens when larger-than-life characters are placed in fascinating situations. That curiosity has helped make her the bestselling author of six previous novels. Now the thirty-something wife and mother who loves dark and twisted tales, having grown up reading Goosebumps, Fear Street, and Stephen King, has penned her seventh book, The Watcher Girl, a fast-paced, entertaining thriller about a woman who becomes obsessed with her old boyfriend, convincing herself that he never got over her and she must save him.
Grace McMullen never stays in one place long. She has lived a number of different places, which is possible because she can work anywhere. She is an internet sanitizer which, she explains, means that “people pay me to remove things they don’t want online. Unflattering articles. Revenge porn. Harsh reviews. Outdated photos. Stuff like that.” Grace comes from a troubled family. Daphne, her beautiful mother, has been incarcerated for many years. After learning that her husband was unfaithful, she arranged to have his mistress murdered in an effort to prevent her meticulously structured, seemingly perfect family life from being destroyed. Grace is the oldest of three children, and the only one who was adopted by her parents. She has long searched for her birth mother, without success. After her mother was convicted, Grace was rebellious and acted out, and was sent to Florida to live with her maternal grandmother while her younger sister, Rose, and brother, Sebastian, remained in New Jersey with their father and his mother, who moved in to assist him with the children. Grace’s childhood was thrown into upheaval not only by her father’s philandering and her mother’s subsequent criminality, but another series of events involving a neighbor who posed as Grace’s biological mother and planned to abduct her. Grace always knew she was adopted, but learned the details surrounding her adoption in a public and humiliating manner. Grace has never been close to her siblings and, in fact, hasn’t seen any of her family members in years. She has always felt like an outsider, convinced she “was born with a darkness inside.”
Sometimes the only thing more terrifying than the unknown is the truth. The truth changes things. It rearranges the way a person interacts with the world.
Grace remains estranged from her mother. Her last visit with Daphne was ten years ago, and only to confront her mother about a true crime novel about her mother’s case. The book contained details that Grave remains convinced could only have been supplied by Daphne — including that Daphne had trouble bonding with her oldest child — and portrayed her father as a sex-addicted narcissist while Daphne was painted as a saint-like slave to her beautiful, privileged life. “She sold us out,” Grace relates in the novel’s first-person narrative, but her father would “never throw us under the bus. Not like that.”
That perceived innate darkness compelled Grace to break off her relationship with Sutton, her college boyfriend, eight years ago, even though they were happy together. Sutton talked about the home and children he longed for, but Grace knew her future could not unfold in the way Sutton dreamed about. She keeps people at arms-length and has no interest in motherhood. So she left Sutton heartbroken and devastated. She explains, “My biggest fear was becoming my mother — a woman so desperate to hang on to her sham of a life, her carefully crafted illusion of happiness, that she was willing to kill for it. Or in her case — hire someone to do the killing for her. . . . But in the end, fear got the best of her. It commandeered her decisions and drove her to do the unthinkable.”
But she never forgot about him. She has followed the developments in his life from afar. Grace’s online sleuthing has revealed that Sutton is living in her hometown, just a few short blocks from the family home now occupied by her womanizing father and his latest younger girlfriend, Bliss Diamond. Sutton is married to a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to Grace and they have an adorable little girl — named Grace. All of which convince Grace that Sutton has never recovered from the breakup and is so obsessed with her that he has gone to extreme lengths to construct a facsimile of the life he envisioned living with her. And she believes that she is the only person who can save him, so she goes home. But her visit will be brief. “I’m here on a mission, and as soon as it’s over, I’m leaving again.”
Kent tells an absorbing and entertaining tale about a woman whose life is founded upon assumptions, and the ways in which she makes decisions and takes action based on them. Grace is a credible and sympathetic character. She survived childhood traumas that resulted in her being banished by her father to live with her grandmother, apart from him and her siblings. Nevertheless, she graduated from college, enjoyed a loving relationship with Sutton until she abruptly ended it because of her belief that she could not live her life the way Sutton wanted, and has a successful, if not altogether fulfilling career. But Kent effectively and compassionately illustrates how Grace’s life and the emotional boundaries she has erected around herself begin crumbling like a proverbial house of cards after she goes home and starts uncovering the truth.
Central to the story is the relationship Grace unexpectedly develops with Campbell, the sweet doppelganger and devoted mother who gradually confides in Grace that life with Sutton is not at all the way Grace imagined it would be, causing Grace to turn her attention from saving Sutton to saving Campbell. In reality, however, Kent deftly reveals that Grace needs to focus on saving herself — quite literally — as she learns that her assumptions and beliefs about her family, relationships with them, and especially about Sutton’s choices were all erroneous. And because of that, she has made choices and plans in reliance upon assumptions that have caused her to misjudge people and situations . . . and could cost her her life as the action accelerates and the book races to an exciting and emotionally satisfying conclusion.
The Watcher Girl is a clever, taut thriller with a gigantic twist that many readers will not see coming. It’s a captivating story about how one woman gets so many things wrong, but is given the chance to make everything right so that she can move beyond her past and, hopefully, find happiness. As Bliss urges her, “People change, Grace. They change all the time. You can move out of the darkest part of yourself and into the light.”
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