Internationally bestselling author Alice Feeney has penned one of her most gripping thrillers to date. BEAUTIFUL UGLY is a powerful reminder of why she has been named --- and continues to reign as --- the Queen of Twists.

Just as Grady Green was preparing to celebrate his first New York Times bestseller, his wife, Abby Goldman, an investigative journalist, pulled to an abrupt stop on a rocky, cliffside road. She told Grady over the phone that she had seen a body lying in the road and was going out to investigate. Grady heard Abby’s breathing fade as she walked away. And then nothing.

Now, one year later, Grady has lost nearly everything --- his wife, whose body was never found; his writing career, which has stalled in his grief; and perhaps even his sanity. His agent Kitty, who is also Abby's godmother, sees that he is drowning and makes him an offer. Charles Whittaker, a former client and mega-bestselling author, left her a cabin on Amberly, a remote island situated 10 miles off the coast of Scotland. Kitty tells Grady that she knows he has another book in him and grants him a three-month stay in the cabin, free of charge. With nothing left to lose and one last shot of reclaiming his life, Grady agrees, setting off with his few possessions and his beloved dog.

"The twist at the heart of BEAUTIFUL UGLY is perhaps one of Feeney’s most memorable. Paired with the tense atmosphere she has created in Amberly and her decidedly unreliable narrators, it upends one of the most beautifully constructed thrillers I have ever read in the best way possible."

The journey to Amberly is the stuff of stories: a seemingly dilapidated ferry, a captain who is a little too quick to clock the outsider, and the eerie sensation that Amberly has stalled in time, forgotten by mainlanders and completely devoid of cellular service or the internet. And then Grady sees Abby on the ferry, her red coat flapping in the wind --- the same red coat that was found over the edge of the cliff sans her body shortly after her disappearance. Grady knows that his perception is unreliable at best after months of grief-ridden insomnia and so many losses, so he writes off the vision as a hallucination.

But the ride gets stranger from there. The ferry’s captain, Sandy --- who is also the town’s sheriff --- tells Grady that Amberly does not welcome visitors in the off-season and that he’s lucky to even be allowed to step foot on the island. But she also says that he is welcome by all and even invites him to dinner at her sister’s place the next day. The dissonance is jarring, but with no other options, he continues on to the cabin.

A car ride and a trek through the woods later, Grady finally arrives at The Edge. His own examination of the cabin finds it to be clean and comfortable, but his dog discovers something more: a loose floor plank…and the bones of a human hand, pointing to a manuscript. It is Whittaker’s final, undelivered manuscript, rumored to be his best novel yet. Grady reads it and realizes that he has only one choice: rework the manuscript in his own voice, deliver it to Kitty and watch his life reemerge from the ashes of his wife’s disappearance.

As Grady begins to recuperate and regain his ability to write (or should I say “rewrite”?), his encounters with the locals continue to shock and confuse. Amberly’s citizens are friendly but also strangely controlling. Orders of mainland food or goods must be conducted through Cora, the local grocer. Businesses that are open when Grady walks by seem to close within minutes, even when he senses that there are still people inside. And then there’s the mysterious crackle of walkie-talkies, always occurring just after Grady has left an establishment and shut the door behind him.

Sandy tells Grady that the island is home to only 25 people and has never seen any crime. However, her sister spills the story of a woman who arrived at the island only one year ago and then disappeared, nearly forgotten until a man’s one-handed body washed ashore shortly after. While this account is shocking, so is the timing. After all, his wife disappeared a year ago after acting strangely and squirreling away money. And there was that hallucination on the ferry. But no, Grady must be inventing stories, right? Then the envelopes start to appear.

Nearly every time Grady leaves his home, an envelope is slipped under his door containing one of his wife’s articles. Each one points to a serious miscarriage of justice, always with a woman suffering at the hands of a man. Grady knows that someone is trying to tell him something, and he senses that it’s related to Abby’s disappearance. With the island’s mysterious nature seeping into his head and fueling the fires of his own imagination, Grady’s paranoia becomes connected to his theft of the manuscript. When he realizes that someone on the island may have read it and may be able to expose him as a thief if the novel does as well as he knows it will, he frantically searches for a way off Amberly. But no one can tell him when the ferry will run or indeed if it ever will again. And then a letter from Kitty arrives. She has learned something about Abby’s disappearance --- and the people of Amberly are not who they seem.

Alternating chapters from Abby’s perspective before her disappearance give readers a bit of background on her marriage to Grady. But readers of Alice Feeney’s work will know that a monumental twist is coming as her storylines never converge in quite the way you expect. The twist at the heart of BEAUTIFUL UGLY is perhaps one of Feeney’s most memorable. Paired with the tense atmosphere she has created in Amberly and her decidedly unreliable narrators, it upends one of the most beautifully constructed thrillers I have ever read in the best way possible. But as much as it is a riveting and tautly plotted novel, it is also a poignant, ruminating exploration of marriage and gender roles.

Feeney is as incisive and cutting in her analyses as she is in her mysteries, pairing extremely relatable marriage woes with ripped-from-the-headlines stories of the oppression and subjugation of women. She writes, “Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t. Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.” And while Grady represents all of men’s worst qualities --- greed, selfishness, ambition --- Abby represents women’s best qualities: “No man is an island, but a woman can be if she needs to be.”