Now that books compete with Netflix and other binge-watching streaming services, tangled plots, flawed characters and unreliable narrators have become essential ingredients of the modern crime novel. Alice Feeney’s latest fast-moving thriller has plenty of these elements for readers willing to suspend disbelief to delve into the murderous private life of a BBC News anchor ... Sympathetic characters are thin on the ground in a twisty tale that tests the limits of plausibility even as it entertains.
In the signature style of many novels of psychological suspense, Alice Feeney uses multiple point-of-view characters to heighten the drama of her latest release ... Feeney presents a tangled web of backstory, reversals, and reveals as the twisted story comes to light ... As the backstory becomes the present, readers discover more and more ways in which all the characters are connected and why no one is exempt from suspicion ... Filled with exquisitely flawed characters and tight, dynamic prose, His & Hers by Alice Feeney may be another New York Times and international bestseller.
Feeney is forced to do a lot of heavy lifting to set up the unlikely scenario but, once things are in motion, her dazzling ability to twist and twist again is fun to read. Even if you don't buy the final switcheroo, you have to hand it to Feeney for daring to give it a go.
Feeney offers a brilliant cat-and-mouse game here: Which of the pair is the murderer; which is being investigated? Add to that mix the fact that the cop slept with the woman victim the night of her murder, and the fact that the anchorwoman who replaced our heroine goes missing the day after her return, and you have one volatile, tension- and thought-provoking mix.
Bestseller Feeney surpasses the dexterous deviousness on display in her 2018 debut, Sometimes I Lie, in this cunningly constructed psychological thriller ... the plot quickens and thickens, and Feeney does a masterly job of folding in layers of several characters’ troubled shared pasts and explosive secrets. The breathtaking finale is sure to blindside readers. This is a masterpiece of misdirection.
Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either ... Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
