GENRE: Fiction/Contemporary Suspense
SETTING: Pennsylvania, USA
WIKI: link
MY GRADE: C
SYNOPSIS: This "extraordinary story" (Julian Symons) begins with an act of naive voyeurism. Robert Forester, a depressed but fundamentally decent man, liked to watch Jenny through her kitchen window, a harmless palliative, as he saw it, to his lonely life and failed marriage. As he is drawn into her life, however, the recriminations of his simple pleasure shatter the deceptive calm of this small Pennsylvania town. With striking clarity and horrible inevitability, Forester is caught up in a series of deaths in which he is the innocent bystander, presumed guilty.
MY THOUGHTS/SPOILERS: It's a good thing things picked up almost 100 pages in else this would have gotten just two stars. I think most of the main characters are poorly written and just awful because of it. The time span may be five or six months.
Robert is almost thirty. He's passive and pretty bland. He's depressed with a past suicide attempt, from New York but moved to Pennsylvania the year before to work as an industrial engineer. He's separated from his wife, Nickie, but they divorce about a month after the story starts. She's incredibly immature, unstable, and out to make his life miserable for absolutely no reason. She teams up with another bad character later on. She's a character who needed backstory.
Jenny is twenty-three and works as a bank teller. She's got serious mental issues. She breaks up with her boyfriend, Greg, who's five years older, and he turns into a stalker who's out for blood. The story begins to revolve around him for over half the book. It's somewhat interesting finding out what happened to him after getting into a fist fight with Robert but was sort of predictable.
There are too many stupid and unbelievable things happening in this book that cause it to get a C rating from me: Jenny befriends Robert after catching him spying on her in her yard one night. She tells her parents she's seeing a married man. He's not interested in dating her but later does. For no reason that I can see Jenny breaks up with him though she's become obsessed with him. She does something bad after that and again, I don't know why. An idiot neighbor makes someone, at gunpoint, give a gun back to a bad guy. What?!
The ending was very abrupt right after awful things happened and you're left puzzled and to draw your own conclusions.
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