The Watcher Girl by Minka Kent

​      Lady thrillers (unless there’s a more suitable moniker for these ever so popular female authored female centric genre)…there are the good, the crappy and the perfectly decent ones somewhere in between. Minka Kent writes the latter variety. Consistently so. This is the third book I’ve read by her to the same effect and personally I do appreciate consistency. Meaning it’s essentially a good enough book well written and diverting, but it just doesn’t have that wow can’t put you down factor.
     Watcher Girl features a 30 year old protagonist named Grace who as the title suggests is a somewhat remote person. Not just because she works remotely, scrubbing undesirable information from the internet, but also in her personal life, in the ways she comports herself, etc. You can’t really blame Grace, when she was just ten her mom went to prison for life for killing her dad’s mistress and then there was an exploitive tell all book about it and the entire thing just really put Grace off relationships, familial and otherwise. She’s been estranged from her two siblings and her father for years and haven’t visited her dad in ages, she can’t even commit to a living situation, drifting around from city to city. Until one day, somewhat suddenly her conscience kicks into overdrive and she decides to go back to apologize to her first and only love, Sutton, for leaving him.
    The idea is that she believes he’s having a tough time from what she gathers online, but in reality he seems to be fine, employed, married, a new dad. Sure, he married a woman who looks like Grace’s doppelganger, sure, he’s named his daughter Grace, but otherwise…fine.
   So Grace returns with best intentions and all and proceeds to do the thing she does best…watch. Though as it soon turns out passive and/or clandestine watching in a town that small is all but impossible and soon she’s getting all kinds of involved in things best left alone.
     And there you have it, a basic love triangle of a story with a few other elements thrown in. It may not be the most thrilling thriller out there and the twist is somewhat predictable, but the writing and character development are the loadbearing elements here. Plus it’s told through a single narrator and timeline, which is nice, for a change. Plus it’s only 236 pages, practically lightweight for a genre that normally go well above 300, often for no reason but sheer volume. So the overall effect is that of an entertaining quick mindless sort of read. And that’s exactly what was expected. Thanks Netgalley.