This is a twisty psychological thriller following Detective Jack Harper and news reporter Anna Andrews when bodies start appearing in their sleepy childhood village. Both have personal ties to the case and as more people are killed, more secrets come to the surface and both are suspected of being involved. They say there are three sides to every story - yours, mine, and the truth. This is one of those types of thrillers where I think knowing less is better but there are some strong TW/CW for grooming and sexual assault.
The pacing for this story was impeccable. The book is on the shorter side with only 304 pages but there is a lot packed into those pages. Bodies start falling right away and our main characters get thrust into the story without too much set up. We get a lot of backstory sprinkled into the narrative as the characters interact and the tension starts creeping up. There are 3 POV in the story and the timing of when to switch between them was always at the perfect moment. There were reveals in each POV that kept the overall plot moving as well as individual character arcs. There wasn't really any 'downtime' in the narrative that we sometimes get with other thrillers. It felt like this was a constant and steady turning up the dial on the tension machine and that really went a long way into keeping me flipping the pages as fast as I could. The more thrillers I read and compare, the more I'm finding that overall pacing is more important to me than the twists and endings. Feeney, for my tastes, has pacing down to a science. It felt like every reveal and every plot point came at the exact perfect time. This is my first Alice Feeney book, but with pacing and structure like this, it won't be my last.
The characters are where I think some readers might lose interest - pretty much everyone in this story is unlikable and unreliable in some way. I really enjoy a good unreliable narrator so getting two was just incing on the cupcake for me. I really liked how the characters were just unreliable enough that the reader would question what was reality, but not too unreliable where we would just pretty much ignore them. In the beginning, Anna reminded me a bit of the protagonist from The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins but Feeney kept Anna much more grounded so we didn't get too far down that rabbit hole. Jack was the sort of stereotypical British detective who is always disheveled and trying to get his life together but I love that trope so much I can't complain. I also loved the added layer of all these characters being connected because of small town life where everyone knows everyone (or thinks they do, at least). So the whole time we're getting these added layers to all these characters and it just kept me guessing to who the killer was which is all I can really ask for from a thriller.
The part I liked the least, unfortunately, was the very last twist. All the twists up to that point had been great, I really enjoyed the reveals and a few even got me to gasp out loud while I was reading alone on my couch. And I think my main issue with the last twist is that I didn't feel like the breadcrumbs were there so it sort of felt like I was blindsided which I know some readers like. I prefer to have the twist revealed and then me to be able to immediately look back on the little snippets of information throughout the story so far and see the build up - which is what I felt we had with all the other twists in the story. I love being able to learn a twist and then go "ah! So that's why X did Y in that one scene". Maybe there were some clues that I missed, but the fact that all the other twists had those breadcrumbs I was looking for and the one at the end didn't just disappointed me a bit.
The psychological thriller elements were really well done and this was the first thriller in a while that literally raised my heart rate. The different POV and the unreliable narrators really help build the layers of tension but then we'd have little reveals like items not being where the characters remember leaving them to really start those mind games that are my favorite part of a psychological thriller. I did find it a little strange that Anna wasn't more concerned with these events - we did get a bit of an explanation in the book but it didn't quite feel believable to me. That being said, Anna being a cool-headed reporter as a sort of direct contrast to Jack's more emotional response was pretty interesting and I think the responses were, at the end of the day, authentic to both characters. I can't emphasize enough how these little psychological thriller elements really got me so drawn into the plot and if this were a movie I would have slapped the person next to me in surprise.
Overall, this is one of the best psychological thrillers I've read. I loved (most of ) the twists, the characters, and the pacing. The very last twist didn't work 100% for me, but it didn't break my overall enjoyment of the story.
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