Alice Feeney books are not all created equal, and I say that as someone who has read four of her eight published novels. Feeney joined the BBC at 21 under the professional name Alison Feeney-Hart, spending roughly fifteen years as a producer, reporter, and news editor before writing Sometimes I Lie in her thirties on the train into the newsroom. She is marketed today as the Queen of Twists, and the four books I have read earn that title more than once. None felt like a weak read. One, though, worked as pure magic in a way the other three came close to but did not quite reach. Here is my honest ranking of the four Alice Feeney books I have read, plus the ones still on my list.
Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney
Daisy Darker (Flatiron Books, 2022) gathers the fractured Darker family on a tidal island off the English coast for the matriarch Nana’s 80th birthday. When the tide comes in, the island cuts them off from the mainland for eight hours. At the stroke of midnight, Nana is found dead. An hour later, another family member follows, and the surviving Darkers realize someone intends to kill them one by one before the tide goes back out. Feeney gives the book an explicit wink to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, and it is the tightest closed-circle structure of the four books I have read (one family, one house, one fixed eight-hour window). The novel became an instant New York Times bestseller, and the New York Times Book Review called it “a worthy, if bonkers, addition” to the closed-circle mystery tradition. I gave it five stars, the only five-star rating among the four, and it sits on both my library and favorites shelves on Goodreads (a dual placement I do not hand out often). The final reveal about who has actually been narrating the story is the best individual twist I have read from her.
This one is for you if you want a Gothic, Christie-style closed-circle mystery with a genuinely earned final twist. Find Daisy Darker on Goodreads.
Rock Paper Scissors by Alice Feeney
Rock Paper Scissors (Flatiron Books, 2021) follows Adam and Amelia Wright, a married couple whose relationship has gone cold, on a weekend getaway to a remote, converted chapel in the Scottish Highlands meant to save their marriage. Adam has lived with face blindness his whole life and cannot recognize even his own wife. Every anniversary, Amelia writes him a letter she does not let him read, until this trip. Feeney builds the entire deception around Adam’s face blindness rather than treating it as a character detail, and the twist (the letters were written by Adam’s first wife, not Amelia) is planted early enough to hold up on a second look. The novel was a CrimeReads Most Anticipated pick, a Book of the Month Club selection, a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Mystery, and an instant New York Times bestseller, and it is now in development as a Netflix series. I gave it four stars and keep it on my favorites shelf, a stronger signal for me than a plain four-star rating on its own. It is Feeney’s most widely read book by rating count.
This one is for you if you want a marriage-under-pressure thriller built around a genuinely unusual narrative device. Find Rock Paper Scissors on Goodreads.
Sometimes I Lie by Alice Feeney
Sometimes I Lie (HQ, 2017 UK edition; Flatiron, 2018 US edition) opens with Amber Reynolds waking in a hospital bed, paralyzed and unable to speak, move, or open her eyes, but still able to hear everyone around her. She cannot remember the accident that put her there, but she suspects her husband was involved. Feeney alternates Amber’s paralyzed present with the week leading up to the accident and a set of childhood diary entries from twenty years earlier. This is Feeney’s debut, published in more than 20 countries, and the book that set up the unreliable-narrator device she has built her career on since. The diary strand’s late reveal recontextualizes almost everything before it, and the book was in TV development at Fox with Sarah Michelle Gellar attached to star for several years before that deal lapsed; producers Tommy Harper and Matt Charman picked up a new adaptation in September 2024. I gave it four stars. The premise is as strong as anything she has written since, though the pacing is a notch less controlled than her later books, which tracks for a debut written on commuter trains between BBC shifts.
This one is for you if you want to start with Feeney’s origin story and the book that introduced her unreliable-narrator trademark. Find Sometimes I Lie on Goodreads.
Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney
Beautiful Ugly (Flatiron Books, January 2025) follows Grady Green, a once-successful novelist whose career has stalled, as he retreats to a remote Scottish island after his wife Abby disappears without a trace. On the island, he meets a woman who looks exactly like Abby, and neither the island nor its handful of residents are what they first appear to be. Feeney returns to the isolated-island setting she used in Rock Paper Scissors, but centers a single unraveling male narrator instead of a marriage told from both sides. The novel became an instant New York Times bestseller. I gave it four stars, the softest four-star rating of the three in this list. The setup is as strong as anything she has written, but the twist does not land with quite the force of Rock Paper Scissors or Daisy Darker. It is still a good, tightly plotted Feeney book. It is just not her best.
This one is for you if you want Feeney’s most recent book and are comfortable with a slightly gentler twist than her best work delivers. Find Beautiful Ugly on Goodreads.
If you are new to Alice Feeney, start with Daisy Darker. It is both the best of the four books I have read and a fully self-contained Gothic mystery that asks nothing of you beforehand. I have not yet read four of her other published novels (I Know Who You Are, His & Hers, Good Bad Girl, and My Husband’s Wife, which came out in January 2026), though His & Hers premiered as a Netflix series that same month with Jessica Chastain as executive producer, which has moved it up my list. Twist, her ninth novel, arrives in 2027. If you like Feeney’s unreliable narrators, Riley Sager is worth a look for a similarly twist-driven read. My list of best thrillers for beginners covers where to start with the genre. Find me on Instagram and Goodreads — I’d love to know which one you read first.