Book Club: Just Watch Me
There will be spoilers.
Since April, my G.F. and I have been reading a new book every month. Our goal is to read 12 new books a year. So far, neither of us have missed a month, and if we each read at least one new book a month for the rest of the year we’ll go on a nice weekend vacation. I’ve been enjoying this monthly tradition so much that I thought I’d share some thoughts on the books I’ve picked. Though I promise no consistency.
“Just Watch Me” by Jeff Lindsey, author the books that Dexter is based on—which is a really good show—reads like it was written for TV. Balancing a cheetah-paced plot, a cast of well-written characters, and enough cheese for a bowl of nachos at Progressive Field “Just Watch Me” is a fun uncomplicated heist novel.
Without reading the book, all you need to know is that the main character, Riley Wolfe, is the best thief of all time. There’s literally nothing he can’t steal. He’s so good in fact, that “Just Watch Me” opens with him wrapping up a heist to steal a 15-ton statue—the book was very clear to make sure to say how heavy it was—by impersonating a retired military officer using a Chinook helicopter in the dead of a Chicago winter. Why? Because like any good Twitter user, he hates the 1% just that much
Though not his main motivation, Wolfe is driven by a shallow desire to one-up himself. Looking for increasingly impossible heists all in order to escape boredom. There not really any other reason, and despite Lindsey’s best attempts to make Wolfe appear to have a tragic past, a boy with a criminal father who gets caught, upending his life, and then turns to a life of crime doesn’t really explain why he’s the best. I would have liked to see more of what made Wolfe. Not just how he was first inspired.
Lindsey spends a good amount of the book hashing out the backstory of Wolfe, both through reliving Wolfe’s memories--he’s the only character in the book to be written through the first-person. And through the main B-story. Where a hard-beat unorthodox Fed who’s been chasing Wolfe down for years finally catches a break and discovers who he was before turning to crime. It’s engaging, and a clever way to give the reader context about a character I found hard to like and unsympathetic to understand.
It’s easy to find other characters in “Just Watch Me” that are plenty enjoyable. Monique, the closest thing to a friend Wolfe has and a master art forger put Wolfe in his place enough that she felt like a reasonable moral foil to the sticky-fingered thief. At the end of the book, after revealing the details of his plan to her, she provides one of the few surprises this novel offers. Though not in any meaningful way to change the depth of this story.
Being static is one of the most standout aspects of this book. Throughout this entire novel, the only way any character changes, if you can call the few people who go through it characters, is by dying. Wolfe doesn’t change as a person, nor does Monique, the Agent, or anybody else.
Earlier in this post, I mentioned that I enjoyed Dexter, the TV series. It’s an excellent piece of television. Very lightweight, full of interesting characters, and each season’s villain is complex enough that you never really know where the stories going until it’s gotten there (except season three). “Just Watch Me” reads the same way, except I knew exactly what was going to happen as soon as Wolfe saw the pictures of the jewels in the inflight magazine. This book is predictable, and though I couldn’t guess how exactly Wolfe would steal the Light of the Ocean, at every turn where a plot device was introduced, I felt the next five chapters come to me like a precognition. If you come into this novel looking to have your expectations heisted, you’ll be sorely disappointed. But there’s no inkling that was what this book intended to do, and so it’s not fair to judge it based on a random expectation.
“Just Watch Me” Also sets itself up nicely multiple times for twists and turns, like when Wolfe is being investigated by the Feds down in Georgia. We learn his real name, but the big reveal about what made him Riley Wolfe, is a story we heard in the very beginning of the book? There’s just a plate full of disappointment when I ordered suspense. It felt like a letdown, the entire B-story was a setup to have a side character learn something the reader had already known for most of the story. Something that doesn’t even affect the plot. And what we didn’t know didn’t even matter. Who cares if his Name is JR? What does that even stand for? Is it literally Junior, or an abbreviation? We don’t know anything about his father except that he got caught. His mother is mystery except that she and her son were close. If I’m supposed to root for Wolfe, give me something personal. Something to identify with beyond something you’d hear at a college ice breaker. Or, if you want me to root for his victims, continue to build them. Give them a win. Not a constant stream of loses so as I’m closing the book, I feel like the real heist was for my enjoyment all along.
What the book lacks in suspense it makes up for plenty with world building. The relationships Wolfe forms for the heist are engaging, and it made me care about Katrina. She was the real victim in the end of the story, and I hope she’s somehow involved in the next book. Where I desperately hope to see Wolfe grow. It does seem, from what I saw in a teaser at the back of my paper copy that Wolfe finally meets a challenge in the second book of this series, which I desperately hope is true. I’ll be picking it up in the future to read and maybe review for this book club.