Title: NightwatchingAuthor: Tracy Sierra
First Published: February 6, 2024
Publisher: Pamela Dorman Books
Pages: 368
Genre: Domestic Thriller, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Thriller
Format: Hardcover
Source: Library
Rating:
Synopsis:
A mother is forced to the breaking point when her life and the lives of her children are threatened by an intruder
Home alone with her young children during a blizzard, a mother tucks her son back into bed in the middle of the night. She hears a noise—old houses are always making some kind of noise. But this sound is disturbingly familiar: it’s the tread of footsteps, unusually heavy and slow, coming up the stairs.
She sees the figure of a man appear down the hallway, shrouded in the shadows. Terrified, she quietly wakes her children and hustles them into the oldest part of the house, a tiny, secret room concealed behind a wall. There they hide as the man searches for them, trying to tempt the children out with promises and scare the mother into surrender.
In the suffocating darkness, the mother struggles to remain calm, to plan. Should she search for a weapon or attempt escape? But then she catches another glimpse of him. That face. That voice. And at once she knows her situation is even more dire than she’d feared, because she knows exactly who he is—and what he wants.
Review
What can I say about Nightwatching other than that it is one of the better thrillers that I’ve read in a long time. I had been struggling with a reading slump when I read it and I found myself captivated. Home invasion is one of my deepest fears, and that fear is perfectly captured in this novel. This book was horrifying and I couldn’t put it down, sacrifice sleep to fly through the pages. A mother and her children are snowed in during a blizzard, and there’s a stranger in the house. I felt genuine anxiety while reading this book, particularly in the first half.
The second half of the novel becomes a bit of a slow burn as the mystery is slowly unveiled, and you learn more about the main character. The amount of gaslighting that happens in this novel really hits a nerve and I couldn’t help but feel so angry. Sierra really leans in to the horror of being a woman and having nobody take you seriously, written off as hysterical.
The only issues I had with the novel was that some of the inner monologue of the main character was overwritten to the point that it came off as silly. Really, who recites rhymes in their head while listening to a stranger creep up the stairs? The main character says and does things that are so bizarre, no doubt in an attempt to illustrate her fragile state, but it pushed the limits of believability for me. Regardless, I devoured this book and it hit all the right notes for me.
Quote
“It was as though grief were a thing she’d swallowed, a parasitic worm that didn’t allow room for food, for proper functioning, for anything but itself.”
Content Warnings
View Spoiler »About the Author
About Tracy Sierra
Tracy Sierra was born and raised in the Colorado mountains. She is an attorney who currently lives in New England in an antique colonial-era home complete with its own secret room. When not writing, she spends time with her husband and two children. Nightwatching is her debut novel.
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