Clara’s Verdict
A husband on the telephone hears his wife slam on the brakes, step out of the car, and then nothing at all. When Grady Green finds Abby’s car at the cliff edge, the headlights are still on, the driver’s door is open, her phone is still on the seat, and his wife has simply stopped existing. Alice Feeney builds Beautiful Ugly on that horribly tidy image, and what impressed me most is how long she lets it ache before she starts twisting the knife.
This is marriage noir of a very deliberate kind. Feeney takes the oldest question in domestic suspense, how well do you know the person beside you, and soaks it in grief: a year on, Grady cannot sleep and cannot write, and his retreat to a tiny Scottish island is less an investigation than a haunting. Then he sees a woman with his missing wife’s face, and the novel tips from mourning into menace. My one reservation is the one I often carry with Feeney: the final stretch asks for a generous suspension of disbelief, and listeners who prize strict plausibility over sleight of hand may feel the floor move once too often.
What This Edition Is and Who It’s For
This is the English audiobook of Alice Feeney’s standalone thriller, published by Macmillan on 30 January 2025 and running to 9 hours and 23 minutes. Feeney arrives with a Sunday Times, multi-million-copy pedigree, and this title was an instant Sunday Times bestseller, so you are buying the commercial thriller event of early 2025 rather than a quiet discovery.
On our shelves it sits between fiction and crime, which feels exactly right. The dressing is literary: a blocked author, a marriage summed up in that sly epigraph about wives believing husbands will change and husbands believing wives will not. The engine underneath is pure psychological thriller: a disappearance, a remote island, a face that should not exist. Expect a slow-burning first half that trusts its atmosphere, then an acceleration into revelation. There is no series baggage either: the story begins and ends here.
Richard Armitage and the Unreliable Husband
Richard Armitage, familiar from The Hobbit and Fool Me Once, leads the narration, and the casting feels almost unfairly apt. His natural register is low, controlled and slightly withheld, and that quality of withholding is precisely what a Feeney husband requires: a voice you instinctively trust while suspecting that you should not. Grady’s insomnia, his guilt and his creative paralysis should sit very comfortably in that darkness.
The publisher’s description also credits Tuppence Middleton, of Downton Abbey, which points to a dual-voiced production, and Feeney’s opening gambit about husbands and wives rather begs for two perspectives. The running time is sensible for the material: long enough for dread to accumulate, short enough that the twists land before your patience thins.
What Readers Say
The publicity is lavish: Lisa Jewell is quoted calling it “her best ever, a work of genius”, and Harlan Coben’s verdict is “her best book yet”. Ordinary listeners are a touch more measured. At the time of writing the audiobook holds a 4.0 rating from 65 ratings, a respectable score that nonetheless hints at a divided room, which is the usual Feeney bargain. Twist-led thrillers rarely leave anyone lukewarm: the architecture either delights you or infuriates you. Sixty-five ratings remains a modest sample, so I would treat the figure as an early sketch rather than a settled verdict.
Who Should Listen?
Listen if you love domestic suspense with a gothic edge: a missing wife, an unravelling husband, an island that keeps its own counsel, all delivered by one of the most quietly sinister voices in British acting. Feeney regulars will find her working at full strength, and Armitage admirers need no further excuse.
Skip it if you resent being manipulated, because manipulation is the whole point of the exercise, or if you need a story you can take entirely at face value. Everyone else should draw the curtains, press play and let Grady’s worst best day ruin a perfectly good evening.
