In Beautiful Ugly, Alice Feeney's seventh psychological thriller, a character muses, "Sometimes I think we are all the unreliable narrators of our own lives." For lovers of suspense, the beauty of Beautiful Ugly is the tantalizing array of characters who suggest unreliability, or worse.
The novel begins with primary narrator and thriller writer Grady Green on the phone with his wife, Abby Goldman, an investigative journalist. She's driving to their home on England's south coast when she tells Grady, "There's a woman lying in the road." Abby goes to check on the body, and after several minutes with no word from her, Grady sets out for her car, but "Abby isn't here. There is no sign of a person lying in the road either." From here Feeney takes the story one year into the future and to a tiny Scottish island--population: 25--where Grady hopes to conquer his writer's block and move past Abby's disappearance, although that's not easy when someone keeps leaving him reminders of his still-missing wife.
Readers may be a step ahead of Grady on one point, but Beautiful Ugly has the astonishing twist that fans have come to expect from Feeney (Daisy Darker; Good Bad Girl). More signature Feeney touches: heavy atmospherics (a mist-cloaked island, skeletal remains) and an unvarnished look at marriage, including through the eyes of a pre-disappearance Abby in the several chapters she narrates. If only the artistically stymied Grady had Feeney's gift for elaborate plotting, his problems would be solved. (His professional problems, anyway.) --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer