Beautiful Ugly

• Author: Alice Feeney
• Genre: Mystery
• Publication Date: January 14, 2025
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for providing me with an audiobook ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The million-copy bestselling Queen of Twists Alice Feeney returns with a gripping and deliciously dark thriller about marriage. . .

. . . and revenge.

Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life.

Grady calls his wife to share some exciting news as she is driving home. He hears Abby slam on the brakes, get out of the car, then nothing. When he eventually finds her car by the cliff edge the headlights are on, the driver door is open, her phone is still there. . . but his wife has disappeared.

A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can’t sleep, and he can’t write, so he travels to a tiny Scottish island to try to get his life back on track. Then he sees the impossible – a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife.

Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t.

Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.

Over the years, I’ve crossed paths with a lot of Alice Feeney books that sounded really good, but haven’t ever actually picked up one of her reads until now. This one sounded like it was made just for me, since it featured all of the aspects I love to see in a mystery. Even better, I was approved for the audiobook. So why wasn’t this one a five star read for me? Let me get into that.

To start with, the audiobook is narrated in dual timelines, by two narrators. Richard Armitage voices Grady, in both the present and past timelines. Further, he also does all of the voices for anyone that Grady comes in contact with, and demonstrates his versatile range using many different vocal tones, inflections, and even accents ranging from posh London to remote Scotland. Tuppence Middleton voices Abby’s character, and for both narrators, everything was easy to listen to and clear to understand.

The bones of this story were all things that I enjoy reading about in other books. Stories set in remote and isolated islands have always captured my attention, especially those featuring an author and a disappearance, so I was primed to love this book. But as the read went on, there were some things that led to my lowered rating.

Grady seems like a rather nice guy who is just going through a hard time when we first meet him. He’s waiting for his wife to come home to celebrate his good publishing news, and while they are on the phone, he hears his wife slam on the brakes before exiting her car. He is immediately concerned, and heads out to look for his wife. When he finds her car, it looks like his wife vanished into thin air, leaving the car and her phone behind. The police get involved but don’t make much headway into the case, and a year later, Grady is still deep in a depression, facing symptoms of grief even without any knowledge of what had happened to his wife.

Obviously, Abby sounds like a jerk face for doing that if she did run away on the same day as a celebration of good news for her husband, but he suspects foul play. We get to know more about Abby and what she did in the days leading up to her disappearance. As I started to feel more like I knew her, I got more invested in her side of the story. 

Initially, the pacing is extremely slow, and stays that way for more than half the book. The setting on the isolated island in the Scottish Highlands was described in such a beautiful way that I was able to practically picture myself right there with the characters. The island itself almost read as another character, making this an incredibly atmospheric read. I could picture cold winds whipping across the land, and a sea frothing with whitecaps.

As much as I loved the setting and the narrators, the plot involves a LOT of willing suspension of disbelief. I don’t mind when a story gets a little bit over the top, but when each plot twist feels like a new level of unbelievable and unrealistic, it was hard to get excited by the plot twists, although I saw part of the big twist coming a long way off. I rarely reread mysteries, because a big portion of the fun is not knowing what is going to happen next. But with this book, I caught myself not being as interested in the surprise, because of how far off the rails this story went. In the beginning, I thought it was going to be more of a somewhat realistic story, and boy was I wrong.

Overall, this was not my typical mystery read, and it impacted my enjoyment of the story. I listened to the entire thing because I always try not to DNF an ARC, but also because I wondered what illogical thing was going to occur next. You know those books that you have to finish but aren’t fully enjoying? That was this book for me. I was underwhelmed by the character development, with the vast majority of side characters feeling flat and underdeveloped, and only the main characters feeling somewhat rounded out, but still not fully. This might be a good read for you if you’re: a fan of Alice Feeney, books set in Scotland, over-the-top mysteries, and dual perspective/timelines. 

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