Audiobook Review: Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney

I received a review copy from the publisher. This does not affect the contents of my review and all opinions are my own.

Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney

Mogsy’s Rating (Overall): 3.5 of 5 stars

Genre: Thriller, Mystery

Series: Stand Alone

Publisher: Macmillan Audio (January 14, 2025)

Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins

Author Information: Website

Narrators: Richard Armitage, Tuppence Middleton

In Alice Feeney’s Beautiful Ugly, a couple’s life is abruptly turned upside down when a celebrated author’s wife mysteriously vanishes. The book opens as Grady Green anxiously paces his home, waiting for good news from his publisher. He phones his wife, Abby, wondering where she is. It’s an important night, he tells her, and he wants her there with him when the call comes. Abby is happy and excited for him, assuring him that she’s on her way back to the house. But that’s the last he hears from her. Their call is abruptly cut off, and later, Abby’s car is found abandoned at the side of the road. Of Grady’s wife herself, there is no sign.

A year later, still distraught over Abby’s sudden disappearance and unanswered questions, Grady is suffering from writer’s block. Desperate to meet a deadline, he listens to the advice of Kitty, his agent who was also Abby’s godmother, and travels to the isle of Amberley for a new change of pace and scenery. Situated off the coast of Scotland, the lonely island is far from the distractions of civilization and offers the solitude required for a writer’s retreat. Grady settles into a recently vacated cabin, which used to belong to another famous author, and hopes that its creative energies will inspire him too.

However, Amberley is full of its own secrets. Years of living in seclusion have also made the island’s residents an eccentric bunch, and not all are happy about the new arrival. Grady starts receiving anonymous messages whose contents are ambiguous and not entirely welcoming. His life suddenly takes another unexpected turn when, following a near-miss incident on a road, he meets a woman who looks exactly like Abby. In fact, it could be Abby, were it not for her different colored eyes and the fact that Grady is a complete stranger to her. But if she is not his wife, then who could she be?

With six books by Alice Feeney under my belt, I’ve come to notice a pattern: her novels tend to feature premises that sound more exciting than they actually are. Case in point, her stories often open with fascinating setups that immediately grab your interest, but the execution doesn’t always live up to the initial pitch. After a while, the narrative starts giving way to familiar tropes or gradually loses the spark that made the beginning so alluring, and truth be told, I think Beautiful Ugly followed a similar trajectory. At some point, it occurred to me that the mystery of Abby’s disappearance might have even been overshadowed by the story’s meandering.

And yet, Feeney does have a way of keeping me entertained. Her sharp prose and skills as a storyteller keep me coming back, because while Beautiful Ugly does demand a fair bit of patience, it is still undeniably intriguing. No matter how insignificant the details may seem, in the end they contribute to a larger puzzle. This is how the author’s stories capture the imagination of her audience. From the get-go, you know something is terribly wrong, and even as the plot trundles its way through doling out even more questions than answers, you can’t help but be drawn into the book’s psychological games.

Grady, for instance, is the perfect unreliable narrator. As his confusion and emotions grow heavier, it makes perfect sense to question everything he sees and hears. A place like Amberley also adds ambiguity to the mix, with its brooding atmosphere and tight-knit insular community of just a few dozen people. Every interaction is a potential clue, but further muddying the waters are the locals’ secrets and motives, not to mention Grady’s own paranoia.

The ending eventually steered things back to the main mystery at hand, but admittedly, the reveals were a bit farfetched, and the conclusion carried an anticlimactic tone that left me feeling like the payoff didn’t match the promise of the initial hook. However, Feeney takes a bold risk with the final twist, and for readers who enjoy these kinds of over-the-top bombshells, they might find it enhances the experience by providing a counterbalance to the novel’s more emotional and grounded themes.

Audiobook Comments: I always love listening to Alice Feeney’s books in audio since they are often narrated by the wonderful Richard Armitage. Beautiful Ugly featured his exceptional voice work, alongside a few chapters read by Tuppence Middleton. Together, their voices brought the story to life and were remarkably on point at capturing the required emotional depth and heartbreak.