Tuesday, 26 August 2025

Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney

 


Ebook previously provided by NetGalley. Thank you.

3/5 stars

Grady Green is an author. He has just phoned his wife, Abby, with news of being a New York Times bestseller when she stops the car saying she sees someone in the road. The call goes silent and when Grady goes to investigate Abby has vanished!

A year later Grady is a broken man living in a cheap hotel and with a writing advance needing to be paid back (he only wrote one book of a two book deal) his debts are accumulating. But then his agent Kitty - Abby's godmother - phones. She needs him to write a new book and she's got just the place he can use, the cabin used by a now deceased author on the isolated island of Amberley off the coast of Scotland.

The island when Grady arrives is a very strange place. A tiny community of 25, phones that don't work, or do they? No consistent schedule to be able to leave the island. Odd looks and comments and for Grady the delivery of some of Abby's old newspaper articles possibly referencing people on the island.

This started off interestingly but it took a lot of time to get anywhere. The pacing struggled. There's only so many paranoid hallucinations someone can take before thinking just get on with the plot! The last quarter where we get all the reveals felt crowded and muddy. There were moments one character mentioned that earlier in the book seemed to belong to another character. Some stuff seemed a bit out of the blue and unbelievable. And then that ending!?!? What was that??? I hated the lack of clarity there.

Steff Out x

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