Dark thriller set in London (with just a nod to Hitchcock)

2nd May 2017

The Watcher by Ross Armstrong, dark thriller set in London.

Lily Gullick, a keen birdwatcher, lives in a new-build flat in London with her husband Aiden. Her smart block is opposite an estate destined for demolition and Lily can’t resist training her binoculars on some of her neighbours. She quickly becomes fascinated by their lives, gives them names and invents histories for them until, one day, she sees something suspicious and shortly afterwards one of her neighbours is found dead. Lily feels that she has some important information regarding the dead woman and so gets herself involved, which doesn’t go unnoticed by the killer and soon Lily finds herself in danger.

Sounds familiar? Well, yes indeed. Armstrong is clearly a great Hitchcock fan and this novel owes more than a little to Rear Window. In Hitchcock’s film, the main character, Jeff Jeffries, is more interested in the people he is observing than he is in the folks in his own life and this is a lesson that Lily also has to learn. But Armstrong doesn’t just confine himself to one film – he manages to create a modern-day version of that memorable scene in The Birds when everyone huddles in the house attempting to prevent the ingress of the winged attackers and, what’s more, there’s some homage to Psycho also, particularly in the gruesome climax.

This is (no surprise here) a psychological thriller and it’s similar to a lot of the ones that have psychologically thrilled us of late – Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train inevitably spring to mind. But this is a clever piece of writing and quite ambitious in terms of structure and narrative. Armstrong risks frustrating the reader by giving us a structure that leaps back in time towards “an event”. Each section is prefaced “42 days before it comes, 15 days before it comes”, etc. Of course, we don’t know what that event is but the sense of impending doom is well done and I certainly didn’t have any idea what was coming. Lily is our narrator and she’s a fairly unreliable one. Armstrong gives us a lot of clues that all is not right in Lily’s world: she fears that she might have inherited a mental illness; the police claim that she is a regular visitor to the police station, although she maintains that has never been there; the gaps in her own memory. It’s subtly done and creates a convincing portrayal of mental illness.

The novel is set in present day London and this, I think, is one of the most interesting things about it. Lily is intrigued by the social divide between the new residents and the soon-to-be-ousted council flat tenants and Armstrong paints a very disturbing picture of life in our inner cities. It’s impossible to miss the social comment: the contrast between the different lifestyles is stark.

All in all, this is a very strong first novel and we watchers would be well advised to keep our binoculars firmly trained on this young writer.

Ellen for the TripFiction Team

You can follow Ross on Twitter

And catch up with Team TripFiction on Social Media:

Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction)

For more books set in London, just click here — and drill down further by genre.

Subscribe to future blog posts