When No One Is Watching

Okay, I’ve loved Alyssa Cole’s writing from her Reluctant Royals series, so when I saw she was writing a new thriller set in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood, I thought: sign me up. When No One Is Watching is the story of Sydney, a Black woman who lives in a historically Black Brooklyn neighborhood that is rapidly changing — her elderly Black neighbors are disappearing while young, white families are moving in. The neighborhood is also being considered as a HQ for a pharmaceutical company, despite local resistance. But as Sydney works on a research project of the neighborhood and reluctantly teams up with a white neighbor, Theo, she begins to notice more and more strange things are happening.

Alyssa Cole describes her pivot from romance to thriller as inspired by her own historical romance research: “I write historical romances set in a variety of periods of American history. But as I’m researching all these different periods, there’s always anti-Blackness. There’s always these kind of incredibly, so cruel that they’re ridiculous, forms of oppression. This book and Sydney’s tour were a way of processing that.”

The publisher describes the thriller as Rear Window meets Get Out, which feels pretty apt. Cole herself calls the novel a “gentrification thriller,” and while it has elements of a thriller (paranoia, fear, tense plotting) much of it is just a slight exaggeration of what is happening in neighborhoods around the U.S. All in all, a fantastic read.

Rating: ★★★★★