Someone is Always Watching

Kelley Armstrong

Fiction

Tundra Books, 2023

349 pages

ISBN: 9780735270947

$14.99

Reviewed by Kiera Bogle

“Do you want to do something bad?”

Those seven words forged an unbreakable bond between two 17-year-olds, Tucker Martel and Blythe Warren, in Kelley Armstrong’s Someone is Always Watching. Armstrong’s latest psychological thriller is set in an idyllic town called Darlington Heights where their parents work for Coeus Medical Technologies (CMT), a firm “working on a possible solution for kids who’d suffered early trauma,” a solution that involves changing the subject’s memories.

When Blythe’s friend Gabrielle has an episode in which she says the school cameras are watching her and that her parents aren’t really her parents because they’re dead, Tucker, Blythe and her boyfriend Callum soon realize “it would become more, so much more.”

Then Blythe starts receiving incriminating emails from someone named Veritas that detail the murder of a 13-year-old boy who had his throat slit. According to her, a pedophile was “framed” for it rather than an 8-year-old boy who “knew exactly what he was doing. Killing a kid who had the nerve to be nice to the guy’s little sister.” Veritas says the murderer is someone in Blythe’s life.

Blythe considers the boys she knows: Callum, who she’s dating; Devon, who had moved away only to return a different person; and Tucker, her best friend who would do anything for someone he loved, as he had when he helped Blythe punish her sexual abuser.

The teens set out to learn the truth, but as the thrilling story twists and turns, they begin to suspect  Callum is not who he seems and that CMT’s list of trial subjects are the key. Meanwhile Tucker and his younger sister Tanya also come under suspicion for the murder Veritas described.

The files reveal Gabrielle’s parents had died when she was a child and her fear of cameras developed after her grandparents put her into a daycare where she endured sexual abuse. “The cameras were always watching, and if she did anything wrong, she’d be punished.” She was adopted when her grandparents died and then placed in the CMT trial.

The files divulge that not only does Bythe’s younger sister Sydney also have a dark and fiery past but Blythe too. Blythe has memories of a younger sister but discovers that the sister she remembers might not have been the one she knows today, and she might not be as much of a good girl as she once thought she was.

Read Someone is Always Watching to see how the teens uncover their own answers, who is ultimately culpable, and why they refuse to stop until they “expose the experiment” and hold CMT to account.

Kelley Armstrong resides in rural Ontario with her husband and three children. She is best known for the Women of the Otherworld series, which began with her first novel Bitten in 2001. Since then, Armstrong has written over 100 books in 18 series and been nominated for the YA Sunburst Award, the Shamus Award for Best Original P.I Paperback, the Audie Award for Short Stories/Collections, and GoodReads Awards in seven categories. A Stitch in Time won the Vivian Award for Speculate Romance in 2021.