Brooke's Pick: Just One Look by Lindsay Cameron

After taking a thankless job as a temp at a law firm, Cassie Woodson begins reading the personal emails between a partner and his enchanting wife and becomes so obsessed with the pair, she plots to take her place.

As creepy as stalker novels are, they are a lot of fun to read, and if you haven’t gotten your fill of voyeuristic tales through Caroline Kepnes bestselling You series, Lindsay Cameron is here with Just One Look, her suspense debut which tells a stalker story from the female perspective. If you love getting into the heads of characters and prefer them to be completely unhinged, then Just One Look needs to go straight to your TBR list.

Cameron’s narrator Cassie has stalker fodder literally handed to her by way of her new temp job. Staffed at a prestigious law firm, it is her role to click through emails, determining if they are relevant to one of the firm’s cases. If she comes across an email that does not belong in the review, she is supposed to weed it out. However, when she comes across some intimate emails between one of the firm’s partners - Forest Watts - and his wife, she does the exact opposite. She becomes obsessed, hoping and praying that more of Forest’s emails will land in her review.

The more she gets to know Forest through his correspondence, the more she wants to take the place of his wife, Annabelle, in his life. Cassie uses the information she gleans from Forest’s emails to get closer to him, innocuously showing up at places she knows he will be and surreptitiously inserting herself into his life. With a plan as brash and daring as this one, Cassie knows that she is playing with fire, but she will literally do anything to become the next Mrs. Watts … anything.

When it comes to the entertainment factor, Just One Look takes the cake! I love psychological suspense novels such as this one that showcase a person’s thought patterns and explain their motives for behaving the way that they do. Additionally, I thought that Cameron was clever in writing the stalker-ish Cassie into a temp position at a law firm where it is literally her job to read other people’s emails, essentially spying on them. Just what secrets about us do our inboxes contain? Apparently enough to fuel the evil intentions of those nefarious enough to cast their eyes upon things they were never meant to see. As you’ll observe through the neurotic Cassie, it doesn’t take much in the Information Age to track down anything you could possibly want to know about a person.

Read Just One Look if you love suspense thrillers told from the guilty party’s POV. This book will appeal to readers of Caroline Kepnes’ You series, as well as those who like books like Chris Bohjalian’s The Flight Attendant, which feature professional females who DON’T have it all together.

Availability: Book
Rating: ***** Stars (I loved it)
Reviewer: Brooke, Public Relations Librarian

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Just One Look

GENRE: Psychological Suspense
TONE: Suspenseful
STORYLINE: Intricately Plotted
WRITING STYLE: Compelling

CHARACTER: Sympathetic
SUBJECT: Anger; Couples; Email Correspondence; Lawyers; Obsession; Revenge; Self-Doubt; Stalking; Temporary Employees; Violence; Women

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