Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Feb 2024
368 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
A razor-sharp thriller about a mother forced to the breaking point when her life and the lives of her children are threatened by an intruder.
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.
"Outstanding...As grippingly suspenseful as the plot is, Sierra's first outing boasts other strengths just as noteworthy, from its transportingly eerie setting to its indelible main character, a petite, prototypical 'good girl' pushed to the brink by years of being underestimated, patronized, and disbelieved by men with power. The icing on the cake is the splendid ending, which feels both surprising and inevitable." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Straddling the line between psychological thriller and domestic horror, Sierra's auspicious debut immediately plunges readers headlong into its unnamed protagonist's waking nightmare...tense, emotionally resonant...Well-timed flashbacks add context and poignancy. Fiercely feminist and viscerally terrifying." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Nightwatching is an intense and claustrophobic thriller--it's terrifying and unputdownable." —Karin Slaughter, New York Times and #1 international bestselling author of After That Night
"Few novels have affected me like this one. Nightwatching is acutely frightening and beautifully written, as tender as it is terrifying. I can't remember rooting for a character quite so hard!" —Abigail Dean, New York Times bestselling author of Girl A
"Tracy Sierra is an impressive new talent. Nightwatching is riveting, by turns a chilling account of a horrifying ordeal and a whip-smart snapshot of marriage, motherhood, and the female experience in a man's world. Psychological terror at its finest." —Gilly Macmillan, New York Times bestselling author of The Manor House
This information about Nightwatching was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Tracy Sierra was born and raised in the Colorado mountains. She is an attorney who currently lives in New England in an antique colonial-era home complete with its own secret room. When not writing, she spends time with her husband and two children. Nightwatching is her debut novel.
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