Lisa Jewell's novels are the literary equivalent of quicksand. You step in intending to read a chapter or two, and suddenly it's midnight, you're waist-deep in the story, and every attempt to stop reading only pulls you in further. So when her latest novel, It Could Have Been Her, was announced, it immediately shot to the top of my TBR pile. Thankfully, her publisher provided me with a copy, and I'm happy to report that it's another addictive thriller from an author who seems incapable of writing anything less than a compelling page-turner.
Jane Trevally lives a quiet life. Divorced, with her children grown and gone, she spends her days rattling around the decaying family home in the countryside. One afternoon, while out walking her dogs, she comes across a small white terrier wandering alone on the trail. Jane recognizes the dog immediately. It belongs to a teenage girl who has been renting a room on a neighboring property. The dog is there. The girl is not.
By the time the teenager is officially reported missing, Jane finds herself saddled with a dog she neither wanted nor has room for. Fortunately, the animal's registration records point her toward its owner, and Jane reluctantly agrees to make the trip to London to return it.
The journey leads her to Thornwood, a crumbling house tucked away in the deepest corners of Hampstead. The moment Jane lays eyes on it, she's overcome with a mixture of fear and recognition.
She's been here before.
Twenty-five years ago, Jane narrowly escaped a deeply unsettling encounter at Thornwood and never expected to see it again. The man who answers the door is not the man she remembers, but he's evasive and claims to know nothing about the missing girl. Jane returns the dog anyway, relieved to put both Thornwood and its memories behind her once and for all.
Then, just as she's about to leave, Jane catches sight of a haunted-looking woman through one of the house's windows.
In that moment, she realizes her connection to Thornwood isn't over. The house sits at the center of two mysteries: the disappearance of the teenage girl and the events that drove Jane from this place twenty-five years ago. To solve one, she may finally have to confront the other.
It Could Have Been Her begins as a seemingly straightforward missing-person case. Jane is the sort of woman who prefers not to make waves, content to keep her head down and avoid stepping on anyone's toes. But lurking beneath that quiet exterior is a restless desire for purpose, a sense that there must be something more waiting for her in the years ahead.
As Jane digs deeper and Lisa Jewell widens the lens to include other perspectives, the true nature of the story slowly reveals itself. And what a story it is. What starts as a simple missing-person case soon spirals into something far stranger and more twisted than I ever expected.
Seriously, this thing goes to some dark, twisted, deeply unsettling places, and I was completely riveted by every new revelation. In the hands of another author, the sheer number of secrets and escalating twists could easily become too much. But Jewell has a remarkable ability to balance the increasingly outrageous developments with quieter character moments that keep everything grounded. No matter how wild things get, the story's emotional core remains believable.
The result is another compulsively readable page-turner that I struggled to put down. Sure, the ending wasn't quite as explosive as I expected, but it still brought the story to a satisfying conclusion. Once again, Jewell reminded me why she's become one of my automatic-read authors. By the final pages, I was sinking deeper and deeper into the mystery, desperate to uncover the truth and powerless to stop turning the pages.
For more information, visit the author's website, Amazon, and Goodreads.
(2026, 49)
