Trigger Warnings: Physical, Emotional, Mental, and Sexual Abuse; child death.

I read I See You a few days ago, and thought it was just okay. I didn't get the hype. In the other critical reviews, many people said that they'd loved I Let You Go, and were disappointed by I See You. So even though I wasn't really meshing with the writing, I decided to give this book a shot, since it was already on my shelves.

I actually preferred I See You.

This book bored the heck out of me. Sorry, not sorry. I had zero interest whatsoever in Ray and his storyline. He was an asshole to his wife and made excuses to cheat on her and never has to really take responsibility for his actions. The story would've been stronger if it had just focused on Jenna and that part of the story. I get that the author used to be a police officer, but I don't care. There's no tension in any of those scenes in the context of the rest of the story. They could be completely absent outside of the scenes with Jenna and it would be the same book. The chapters with them completely disrupt the pacing and I found myself zoning out during those passages.

The other POV, that of Ian, I found to lack any nuance whatsoever. I wouldn't have minded if it were used more sparingly, but I didn't want his point of view on anything. I would much rather get that information through Jenna or some other means. He felt very one-dimensional for a character whose head we're in for a third of the story. The abuse Jenna suffers at his hands is disturbing, absolutely, but also feels a little over the top. It seems designed to produce sympathy for Jenna and explain her inexplicable actions after the child's death.

As for Jenna, her actions made no sense to me. She runs away from him because she's scared of Ian, but instead of going to the police and telling them what happened and having Ian get arrested, she runs off and starts a new life? Then lies and says it was her driving instead of, again, telling the police the truth and asking for their protection? There is zero reason that makes any sense why she would take the fall for him. None.
I also didn't like that after she's arrested for a hit and run that resulted in the death of a CHILD, her first thought was that she didn't want her boyfriend to find out and wondered if she'd be able to 'keep him'. What?! Woman, you have bigger problems than your flipping love life! What in the world?!

As for the 'twists', yes, the first that Jenna was actually in the car and not the child of the mother took me by surprise. But to learn that it was actually her husband driving didn't surprise me at all. The fact that he was actually the father of the child hit was ridiculous. I actually did guess that he was the father before I knew that he was driving. I thought that maybe she'd found out he fathered a child outside their marriage and was following the child and mother and accidentally hit him. But the idea that they would be in the middle of London, a city of millions, and just happen upon his one-time mistress and their child and purposely run the child down is asking me to suspend disbelief to a point that is just not going to happen.

In the author's note, she talks about how she wanted to explore how grief and guilt 'might affect two women, involved in very different ways in the same accident' and that this book was the result. Now, I would've liked to read that book. But that is not what this book is. We get nothing in the perspective of the poor woman whose child was murdered. She and her son are just a means to an end, a catalyst for this plot-contrived mess. Instead of the drivel that is Ray's story, we could've had Jacob's mother's perspective. Or maybe we could've learned more about Ian through her, instead of being in his abusive shitty perspective for any length of time. But that is not what we were given.

I've come to realize that Clare Mackintosh is not the author for me.