There’s no denying that the arrival of every one of Lisa Jewell’s 24 psychological thriller masterpieces is an event. What captivates and hooks Jewell’s readers into tearing through her novels like a bookworm on crack is the implied weirdness and evil of her characters, traits that are itching and ready to spill over at the slightest provocation.
#It Could Have Been Her is no different.
We are reintroduced to Jane Trevally who we first met in Jewell’s 20025 #Don’t Let Him In thriller, a tale that is still banging around in my I-hope-I-never-meet– “him” psyche. In this new book, Trevally is walking her dogs on the grounds of the large country estate she’d inherited when she comes across a little white dog, Hugo, who is roaming about on his own. What follows is Trevally’s search for Hugo’s owner, whose name she finds out is Daisy, a young teenage girl who has seemingly disappeared into thin air. The murky evil kind. The trail leads Trevally to a run-down house in the backwaters of Hampstead and when she knocks on the door, Allen, who reminds her of a man she met in a Soho bar when she was a mere twenty-nine years of age, fills the door frame. At that very moment, an unsettling trajectory of old memories and horrors begins to build even as it unravels.
Many of Jewell’s starring characters have an implied weirdness and evil about them that drive the psychological impact of the narrative, and the cast of #ItCouldHaveBeenHer is no different.
Jessamine, whose days revolve around drinking at a local pub while periodically checking her watch to make sure it’s not yet time to pick up her young daughter from daycare, initially tugs at readers empathetic heart strings. First impressions of her being weak, lonely, and malleable in her alcohol and co dependency addictions are merely an illusion, masking the horrific secrets she knowingly hides behind.
And then there’s Stuart, the couch surfing leach, who’s more than happy to keep Jessamine company, drinking her booze and sharing her bed until things get rather sticky, especially as it relates to Jessamine’s mother Annie, who has her own cellar full of buried secrets. Add Jessamine’s circus-working-brother, Jasper, whose antics as a clown are nothing to laugh at, douse that with the presence of unspeakable evil and you have yet another master class in psychological thrillers with Jewell’s, #It Could Have Been Her.
Jewell is famously known for leaving readers with more head scratching questions than definitive answers – and she does so once again, leaving devotees pondering the whos’ the why’s and the how could they’s long after they’ve finished the book.
