The Neighbors Are Watching

• Author: Aggie Blum Thompson
• Genre: Mystery
• Publication Date: June 30, 2026
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for providing me with an ARC of this e-book and audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

From the “master of suburban scandal” (Samantha M. Bailey) comes a scandalous suburban thriller about privilege, unlikely friendships, and the lengths we go to protect our family.

Just outside Washington D.C. sits Eastbrook, Bethesda — a leafy suburb with top schools, manicured lawns, and friendly neighbors. It’s not the kind of place where nannies are shot during robberies gone wrong. But like any picture-perfect neighborhood, it’s been easy to cover up the shadows and move on.

A year after the unsolved neighborhood murder, Caren, nearing fifty and staring down an empty nest, has one too many drinks at a graduation party and blacks out on her way home. At least, that’s what everyone says happened. Caren suspects she was drugged by someone. But who?

When Caren teams up with a new neighbor who is desperate to figure out who murdered his best friend last year, they start to uncover what Eastbrook has tried to forget. But in a place where appearances are everything, their search for the truth means not only shattering carefully built façades — but putting themselves squarely in the crosshairs of a killer.

My taste in books might be fairly predictable, but I really like finding new authors and characters to love. It can be a bit unpredictable which I’m going to love and which I won’t connect with. This is one of those books where it seemed to have a great premise, but I had a hard time connecting with it and suspending the amount of disbelief that is required to get invested in the story.

Let me start with what I did like about this book. I love the trope of an affluent neighborhood full of rot, just waiting to be exposed. This book leans heavily into that trope, setting it in an affluent suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, and I appreciated that there was diversity incorporated into the story in a way that felt organic and realistic. There are white, Black, Asian, and Latino characters who live in this area, and the close connections between the families through their children and hobbies have developed over decades offered a small-town vibe to this enclave that isn’t always seen in suburbia.

I read this primarily via audiobook, although I did use the ebook as a fallback when I wasn’t able to listen to an audiobook. The narrator, Alex Picard, did a wonderful job with a tough story, and was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the story. She was able to accurately capture the voice of all the neighborhood characters and even a few accents. 

Another thing I enjoyed was the way Caren was so much the opposite of a ‘Karen,’ and the added complexity to her character as a woman who is in her late 40s and facing a huge change in her life as her youngest child has graduated high school and she’s preparing for life as an empty nester. There is also transgender representation in the story, and I really liked how easily Caren accepted her new friend Fin without question when he came out to her as trans, something he has only done with a couple of other people in the area.

The story is told through the eyes of three different characters—Caren, Fin, and Tori—so we get to see the plot unfold in multiple perspectives, giving a more well-rounded understanding once all the pieces start to come together. However, the timelines aren’t all in the same chronological order, and frequently jump back and forth in time. It’s clearly labeled at the start of each chapter, but when listening to the audiobook, it got a little confusing. The jumping timeline felt jarring particularly in audio format, but the character voices were differentiated really well.

Peopled with a cast of characters who all seemed to vary in their level of awfulness, almost none of the characters are actually likable. It really came down to Fin and Caren, although there were some things that I didn’t love about Caren. She reads as really immature and completely oblivious to everything around her. I found it hard to be inside of Tori’s head, with her trauma history and negative thinking. Her character also lent some really negative characterization to therapists—she’s an awful example of a therapist, constantly distracted and manipulative, even resorting to using her clients for her own purposes rather than helping them.

With so many unlikable characters, there are plenty of red herrings to misdirect the reader. The plot was fairly predictable, and it wasn’t more than a few twists and turns before I had it figured out. It was the motive of it all that led this story off the rails: it felt like too small of a motive to require all of the planning and deception, and ultimately became so over the top, it felt ridiculous. It was hard for Caren to even consider that someone who knows her well could be behind what she is convinced is a drugging and attack, while everyone around her seems convinced that she just overdid it at a neighbor’s party and fell. Each of the POV characters has their own motive, while all the characters seem to have their own, independent agenda designed to hide their secrets and benefit their family in some way.

Overall, this falls right into the popcorn category of mystery/thrillers. It’s over the top, but it still could have been an interesting read. However, the way that every single character is not very likable made it tough for me to really find the book enjoyable. The big reveal of what actually happened was so much of a letdown after plodding through this entire read, and I felt disappointed in this one. I struggled to connect with the characters, aside from Fin and to some degree Caren, and the varied pacing that occurs throughout the story and jarring perspective and time shifts made this feel so much slower than I was expecting from it. I’m hopeful that it’s just this book I didn’t enjoy, and that the author’s other works hold my attention more, since I’m not quite ready to give up on her. 

Bottom line: This is an over the top mystery/thriller that relies heavily on tropes and a huge willing suspension of disbelief, but if you go into it expecting that and are prepared to read about a whole cast of unlikable characters, you might enjoy it more than I did.

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