Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney has so many twists and surprises it feels like an infinite tangle of mobius strips. I read it quickly, thinking I knew what was happening. Sometimes I guessed right, sometimes I was wildly wrong. 
Author Grady Green is having a brilliant day until his wife disappears. He doesn’t know if she’s dead or alive, kidnapped or washed out to sea. Abby, a journalist, has been receiving threats related to newspaper stories she’s written. Grady is trapped in a nightmare turmoil of grief and hope, unable to accept Abby is dead, unable to sleep, always hoping. A year later he is ill, not writing, out of money and he keeps seeing Abby everywhere. He thinks he’s going mad. His agent, in a desperate attempt to help him write another bestseller, sends him to a writer’s cabin on a remote Scottish island. Grady likes being alone, that’s when he writes best, so he agrees.
Once the action moves to the Isle of Amberly, Beautiful Ugly becomes a closed room mystery. On the ferry over from the mainland, Grady sees Abby again. Although he starts to feel a little better he still isn’t sleeping, despite copious alcohol and pots of the local herbal bog myrtle tea. He sees things, he hears things; or does he? His only companion is his dog Colombo. Amberly is completely isolated. No mobile or internet signal, no landlines, an occasional ferry to the mainland. His writer’s cabin is in the woods, miles from anyone, and is creepy. The local residents, all 25 of them, are rather strange. And there are rules. No visitor may drive a car. Only residents are allowed to communicate with each other by walkie-talkie. Although everyone seems friendly, Grady begins to feel trapped. And then old newspaper cuttings of stories written by Abby are left in the cabin for Grady to find.
Most of the story is told from Grady’s point of view, which raises the inevitable question: is he a reliable narrator. But we also have chapters from Abby before her disappearance and this fills in some back story. We see how they meet on a plane, their whirlwind romance, but as the years pass there are tensions just below the surface. Both have their secrets, both are obsessive about their work. Abby says to a counsellor, ‘Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t. Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.’
A very clever plot, even if some twists are easy to spot. An unsettling thriller that examines truth and lies in relationships, promises made, things you don’t tell your partner and secrets you don’t admit even to yourself. Throughout the book I was also getting flashbacks to films such as Hot Fuzz and Misery.
Here’s my review of SOMETIMES I LIE, also by Alice Feeney.
If you like this, try:-
‘The Hunting Party’ by Lucy Foley
‘Before the Fall’ by Noah Hawley
‘The Ice’ by Laline Paull
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview BEAUTIFUL UGLY by Alice Feeney @alicewriterland https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-8Dd via @SandraDanby
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