Someone's Watching by Sharon Potts

Published by Oceanview on February 7, 2011

Kate and Joanne are high school seniors who visit Miami for spring break. When they go missing, Kate's father travels to Miami to look for them, and also to see Robbie, the daughter he hasn't seen since she was seven. Now twenty-five, Robbie learns for the first time that she has a half-sister. Robbie initially wants nothing to do with her long-absent father, but after recognizing her own features in a photograph of Kate, she takes it upon herself to find her missing sister. Robbie's boyfriend Brett and ex-boyfriend Jeremy each play a part in the mystery of Kate's disappearance. Rounding out the cast are the owner of a trendy South Beach nightclub, a congressman, a writer whose husband is a politician, a female police detective, and an assortment of lowlifes. The engaging plot keeps Robbie and Jeremy in motion as they repeatedly encounter dead bodies (always in a way that makes Jeremy look like a suspect), while subplots address Robbie's indecision about which man she wants as a boyfriend and her ambivalent feelings about her father.

Jeremy apparently played a central role in Sharon Potts' first novel, In Their Blood. Someone's Watching makes occasional reference to the events in that book. Other characters from that novel (including Robbie) reappear in this one, but my impression is that the stories are only tangentially related. Although I haven't read In Their Blood, I don't think my understanding of this novel was diminished by not reading that book first.

While enjoyable, Someone's Watching is not without its flaws. To solve the mystery, Robbie draws conclusions that are not based on logic or even reasonable intuition (along the lines of "I found this shoe I've never seen before outside this house I've never visited before. It must be a clue!"). The plot depends upon several coincidences that stretch credibility well beyond its breaking point. Kate could easily remove herself from a nightmarish situation but implausibly fails to act. Robbie and Jeremy do some remarkably stupid things, equivalent to the slasher movie victims who decide to walk into the woods where people keep turning up dead. A subplot involving Robbie's estrangement from her father is unoriginal. The prose is sometimes a bit breathy for my taste, including sentences like: "Jeremy Stroeb. Why couldn't it have been forever?" Although this is billed as a suspense novel, it sometimes has the flavor of a chick lit romance. Some sentences seem to have been fashioned for a seventh grade reading level, like: "His words stung. They stung a lot." For the most part, however, Sharon Potts' writing style is capable and, fortunately, the story usually focuses on Robbie's search for her sister rather than her tiresome musings about her failed relationships.

Putting aside its credibility problems, Someone's Watching is entertaining. At some point the novel turns into a whodunit and Potts plays fair: although the villain's identity is less than obvious, the clues are all there. The pace is brisk. Robbie and Kate have well-honed personalities (the male characters, not so much). Had the writing been a bit more polished and had the story relied a bit less on coincidence, I would have recommended the novel without reservation. As it stands, I can only cautiously recommend it to thriller fans, particularly those who would welcome a bit of chick lit mixed in with the thrills.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS