Nightwatching

Author: Tracy Sierra
Genre: Psychological Thriller
368 pages
Publisher: Pamela Dorman Books

Synopsis
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.

My review
Nightwatching is Tracy Sierra’s debut thriller, and it kicks off with a chilling premise. From the first page, the tension is palpable – you could cut it with a knife. A mother, snowed in with her two children during a blizzard, hears footsteps on the stairs. After countless sleepless nights, she knows every creak of her old house, and these are not familiar sounds. Someone is inside. Someone dangerous. Desperate to reach her children before the intruder does, she wakes them and together they hide in a secret room, hoping the stranger won’t find them.

The opening is intense, claustrophobic, and atmospheric. I tore through those first chapters, excited to see where the story would take me. Unfortunately, once the immediate danger was over, the story shifted. Rather than the relentless, high-stakes survival story I was expecting, the middle of the book drifted into a slower, “no one believes me” narrative. Unfortunately, the momentum that had me glued to the page all but disappeared and I became frustrated with the most of the characters and the continuous backstories.

By the time the truth came out, the reveals felt rushed, packed into the ending instead of being carefully unraveled along the way. While the protagonist’s anxious inner voice added to the tension early on, it grew repetitive in the second half, and I struggled to see how the backstories meaningfully tied into the present-day plot.

In the end, Nightwatching had a gripping setup but uneven execution. It started with a bang, but by the halfway mark, it lost steam. An intriguing idea that ultimately didn’t quite land for me.

My recommendation: an OK read but not one I can highly recommend.