Watching John

John works in home security, which means he spends his days watching strangers' lives play out on screens. He is careful never to draw attention to himself. His reasons go back to childhood, when he saw what happened to his sister because nobody stepped in to protect her. That experience taught him to recognize the signs of a predator, and he has never been able to stop seeing them.

Most of what crosses his monitors is ordinary family routine, but now and then he spots something wrong beneath the surface: a house heavy with secrets, a little girl living in fear, and a man who craves control because the rest of his world makes him feel powerless. Some nights the footage shows a man lit by his computer screen, sending sickening messages to a child in a chatroom.

When the official systems fail yet another girl, John decides to act himself. The further he goes, the less clear it becomes whether he is protecting the innocent or turning into the kind of person he has set out to stop. The novel is a dark exploration of vigilantism and of how good and evil coexist in the same people.