The Last Word

While not generally a horror aficionado, I love suspense and will buy certain author’s sight unseen and reviews unread if they promise an exciting ride, particularly around Halloween. Recently I perused two new examples: The Maidens, by Alex Michaelides; When No One Is Watching, by Alyssa Cole.

Michaelides’s first book, The Silent Patient, bolted out of the gate to a place on multiple bestseller lists. It had some unique plot twists that gave it a leg up with the public. Unfortunately, I did not find that to be the case with his sophomore effort, The Maidens. The plot felt forced, and the author pointed at one character as the prospective murderer so often that anyone who has ever read a whodunnit would suspect that he is not the guilty party.

The main character, Mariana Andros, is a group therapist mourning her husband, who died in an accident in Greece. Her niece, Zoe, who is at Cambridge University, is stunned by the death of a friend, Tara, a member of a group of powerful, brilliant undergraduate women called the Maidens, acolytes of a charismatic, menacing professor of Greek mythology and drama and called Edward Fosca. Mariana decides to go to Cambridge and bring her therapeutic skills to bear on the group dynamics surrounding the Maidens as one after another succumbs to a killer.

I would not recommend this mythology-tinged book to anyone looking to be held in thrall. The writing is clunky, the characters are two-dimensional, and the unexpected denouement is entirely unconvincing. Give this one a miss.

When No One Is Watching, by Alyssa Cole, is more than a mystery—it’s a fictional horror story and thriller about urban development, communities displaced by gentrification, social justice, African-American history, and racial politics. The main character, Sydney Green, is an African-American woman who has grown up on the fictional Gifford Place, an area with brownstone buildings reminiscent of traditional working-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

Sydney is struggling to keep her mother’s brownstone as her Black neighbors and friends are being forced out by rising costs along with other, more insidious reasons. These neighbors start to disappear in mysterious ways or get arrested for false reasons under strange circumstances as whiter, middle-class residents move into the area, creating a greater and greater sense of unease for Sydney and her community. Under the guise of revitalization, it shows how gentrification perpetuates inequality and ramps up police brutality as developers find ways to shove out traditional populations, perpetuating racism on multiple levels.

Sydney becomes acquainted with a white neighbor, Theo, who buys a house on Gifford Place with his white girlfriend, Kim, before