With My Little Eye

With My Little Eye is Joshilyn Jackson’s 2024 thriller, her latest entry in the suspense corner she moved into with Never Have I Ever and continued with Mother May I. The novel centers on Meribel Mills, a former Hollywood actress who has returned to her childhood home in suburban Atlanta to raise her teenage daughter Honor in a quieter environment after Meribel’s career and Hollywood marriage ended in difficult circumstances. The quiet does not last long. A persistent and increasingly frightening online stalker is making clear that Meribel’s past public profile has not actually allowed her to disappear, and the threats begin to escalate from digital harassment to something much closer to home.

Jackson handles this material with the unflinching honesty her recent thrillers have shown. The contemporary digital stalker plot draws on real research into how online harassment campaigns develop and how the legal system fails to provide protection until the threats reach a level that often comes too late. Meribel’s situation is layered. She is a public figure whose visibility has made her a target. She is a single mother whose daughter is exposed by association. She is a Black woman in a predominantly white Atlanta suburb whose presence at her own house has been questioned by neighbors who do not recognize her. The various pressures combine in ways that give the novel its weight beyond the central thriller plot.

The relationship between Meribel and her daughter Honor anchors the emotional side of the book. Jackson is one of the strongest writers of mother daughter relationships in contemporary southern fiction, and the Honor sections of the novel show why. Honor is a teenager with her own developing identity, her own complicated feelings about the famous mother whose career she has lived in the shadow of, and her own ways of dealing with the danger that is closing in around their family.

For longtime Joshilyn Jackson fans, this novel is her at her most propulsive and her most socially engaged. For new readers, With My Little Eye is a strong contemporary thriller from one of the more interesting writers in the genre.