The Book:
His and Hers by Alice Feeney, 2020
The Characters:
BBC reporter Anna Andrews; DCI Jack Harper; Anna’s childhood friends Rachel, Helen, and Zoe (who is Jack’s sister)
The Plot (from the publisher):
Anna Andrews finally has what she wants. Almost. She’s worked hard to become the main TV presenter of the BBC’s lunchtime news, putting work before friends, family, and her now ex-husband. So, when someone threatens to take her dream job away, she’ll do almost anything to keep it.
When asked to cover a murder in Blackdown―the sleepy countryside village where she grew up―Anna is reluctant to go. But when the victim turns out to be one of her childhood friends, she can’t leave. It soon becomes clear that Anna isn’t just covering the story, she’s at the heart of it.
DCI Jack Harper left London for a reason, but never thought he’d end up working in a place like Blackdown. When the body of a young woman is discovered, Jack decides not to tell anyone that he knew the victim, until he begins to realize he is a suspect in his own murder investigation.
One of them knows more than they are letting on. Someone isn’t telling the truth. Alternating between Anna’s and Jack’s points of view, His & Hers is a fast-paced, complex, and dark puzzle that will keep readers guessing until the very end.
The Twist:
When Anna begins to recount the story of her 16th birthday, this book turns truly dark. Her childhood friends were terrible. Rachel pretty much pimped out Anna and Cat, for lack of a better term, to some older men who “paid good money to celebrate [Anna’s] birthday with [her]”. Helen coerced Anna into taking pills to make her skinny. Rachel and Zoe stole their neighbors’ cats and let them die of starvation to make coats out of their fur.
Coincidentally, Cat Jones is the same Catharine that was at Anna’s birthday party; she is also married to Anna’s cameraman in the present storyline. This was a huge red herring, though.
The Spoilers:
The killer was Anna’s mom, which there was no way to see coming. All the loose ends were tied up by the end though–she was faking dementia, so no one suspected her. She had watched Anna’s friends be terrible to her all through high school, and found the suicide note Anna had written and then burned.
She murdered the women partly as revenge and partly as a way to get Anna to come back into her life. I wondered somewhat why she felt that Cat needed to be murdered. She mentioned that it was because she had stolen Anna’s job, but that’s not quite on par with what the other girls had done. Perhaps Anna’s mom just enjoyed killing at that point.
The Ending:
Jack and Anna get back together, get custody of Zoe’s daughter (Jack’s niece), and move back to London. Anna rents out her mom’s house after paving over the vegetable garden where her father is buried, moves her mom into a residential care home, and gets her lunchtime news job back. Anna’s mother lets Anna know that she was faking dementia the whole time.
The Review:
This book was amazingly well written. It is the sort of unreliable narrator story that makes the reader think, “Wait, what??”. I kept thinking I knew who the murderer was but then the author would change my mind again, and in the end, I was completely wrong. I happened to listen to this one as an audiobook, and I think the voice actors made the story even better. The voice of the murderer was done through a voice changer so that you couldn’t figure out any hints from the accent or gender. It’s definitely worth it to go into this book with nothing but the jacket description, so I don’t want to say too much. Just know that if you are looking for a twisty psychological thriller, you will not be disappointed.
Do you listen to audiobooks? I prefer holding a physical book, of course, but audiobooks are a fantastic compromise when you need your hands or eyes for something else. When I’m driving long distances (as I was for most of listening to this one), a good audiobook does a much better job of keeping me awake than music or news!
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