Submission 4143

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Author: Lisa Jewell

Published: 2026

Genre: Other Genre

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This book is handpicked by the IBC Editorial Team. If you are an author, publisher, or reader and would like to have a book reviewed by IBC, you may reach us at editorial@indianbookclub.com — we’ll be happy to review it.

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A small white terrier appears alone on a country estate, and everything that follows is Lisa Jewell doing what she does better than almost anyone: pulling an ordinary life slowly, irresistibly into something dark. It Could Have Been Her begins with a missing teenager and a stray dog, and ends somewhere considerably more disturbing. When Jane Trevally traces the dog's registered owner to a run-down house in the backwaters of Hampstead called Thornwood, what she finds there is not just a lead on a missing girl but a building that holds her own buried history. Jewell constructs her thriller across multiple timelines and perspectives, piecing together the secrets of a house that has been hiding something for twenty-five years. Atmospheric, deeply unsettling, and built around the particular dread of a dysfunctional family whose damage has been carefully kept behind closed doors.

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Jane Trevally's morning walk takes an unexpected turn when a small white terrier appears on her country estate without explanation, and without the teenage girl he was last seen with. When the girl is reported missing, Jane makes a decision that will pull her back into territory she has spent decades not revisiting: she offers to return the dog to his registered owner, a journey that takes her hours away to London and to a house called Thornwood. Thornwood is run-down and immediately wrong in a way that Jane registers before she can articulate why. The man who answers the door is not the man from her past, but the house is the same, and the past it holds is the same past she has been living alongside for twenty-five years without examining. He claims to know nothing about the missing teenager. As Jane turns to leave, she catches a glimpse through the window of a woman who looks as though she is not there by choice. Jewell moves the novel between timelines and perspectives with the structural confidence that has made her one of the most reliable architects in contemporary psychological thriller fiction. The present-day investigation and the historical events at Thornwood converge gradually, each revelation reframing the last, until the full shape of what the house has been containing comes into view. The missing teenager provides the novel's immediate urgency, but it is the relationship between Jane's past and Thornwood's present that drives its emotional engine, and the particular atmosphere of a house that has absorbed decades of damage is one of Jewell's most effective settings.

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“The house as keeper of secrets”: Thornwood is not simply a location; it is a character with its own history and its own capacity for concealment. Jewell has always been particularly skilled at using domestic space as a psychological container, and in It Could Have Been Her, the run-down house in Hampstead carries its secrets with the weight of years. The damage done within its walls has not dissipated; it has been preserved, and the novel's central movement is the gradual exposure of what Thornwood has been holding. “Dysfunctional family as the engine of harm”: The novel leans heavily into family drama in its most disturbing register, and Jewell renders the specific dynamics of a family whose internal logic has become entirely separated from any external moral framework with uncomfortable precision. The characters within Thornwood are not simply villains; they are people shaped by a particular environment into particular patterns, and understanding how those patterns were formed is one of the novel's primary interests. This is, as Jewell's best work always is, less about the what than the how. “The past's refusal to stay buried”: Jane's traumatic history with Thornwood has been suppressed rather than processed, and its eruption back into her present is precipitated not by her own readiness but by circumstance, by a stray dog and a missing girl and the particular logic of a past that was never fully resolved. Jewell is consistently interested in the way unprocessed history surfaces under pressure, and the connection between Jane's personal trauma and the house's ongoing harm gives the thriller its emotional dimension beyond the immediate mystery. “The believability of evil in familiar settings”: One of Jewell's most consistent achievements across her work is the production of fiction that feels, unsettlingly, like it could happen. The events in It Could Have Been Her are dark but not fantastical; they belong to a category of domestic harm that is, in various forms, documented and real. This quality of adjacency to the actual, of a thriller that disturbs because it does not feel entirely impossible, is one of the most difficult effects to achieve and one of the most powerful when it works.

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The first glimpse through the window. Jane's brief, ambiguous sighting of the woman inside Thornwood as she prepares to leave is one of the novel's most effectively constructed moments. It is enough to stop her and enough to stop the reader, but not enough to constitute evidence of anything. Jewell calibrates these moments with real precision, understanding that the most effective thriller images are the ones that plant a question the reader cannot unask. Thornwood itself. The house is described with enough specific physical detail to feel genuinely inhabited and genuinely wrong, a place where the ordinary signs of a domestic life coexist with something that cannot be named immediately but is immediately felt. Jewell uses setting as a primary thriller tool, and the atmosphere she generates around Thornwood, its run-down exterior, its history, its current occupants, is one of the novel's most sustained achievements. The dual timeline structure. Moving between the present investigation and the events of twenty-five years ago allows Jewell to manage dramatic irony with unusual precision: the reader accumulates information from both timelines simultaneously, and the effect is of a picture assembling itself from two directions at once, with the full image only becoming clear when the perspectives finally converge. The structure suits the material, and the short chapter format keeps both timelines feeling equally urgent. Jane as a protagonist. She is the novel's most quietly interesting element, a woman who has been living alongside her own history without fully confronting it, and who is now forced to do so by circumstances entirely outside her control. Her decision to pursue the missing girl, and to follow the trail back to Thornwood, is the novel's central act of courage, and it is rendered with enough psychological specificity to feel earned rather than convenient.

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It Could Have Been Her is for readers who come to Lisa Jewell's work for the atmospheric, character-driven psychological thriller she has made her signature, and who want that register delivered with her characteristic efficiency and tonal control. If you have read and loved The Family Upstairs in particular, this novel operates in similar territory: a house with a long, dark history, a family whose internal dynamics have generated harm across generations, and a structure that withholds and reveals with careful precision. Readers who are drawn to multi-timeline psychological thrillers, in which the present and the past gradually reveal their connection, will find Jewell's management of this structure among its more confident recent examples. The short chapters create a pace that makes the novel genuinely difficult to put down, and the shifting perspectives ensure that the information the reader has is always slightly ahead of what any single character knows, which generates a sustained dramatic irony that is one of the most effective tools in the genre. For readers who respond to thrillers that are as much about people as about plot, about the specific psychology of damaged families and the harm they propagate rather than simply the mechanics of a crime, this novel will feel particularly resonant. Jewell has always been more interested in understanding than in simply revealing, and the character work here, flawed, complex, and uncomfortably human throughout, gives the thriller its genuine weight. A note of honest guidance: the novel is not Jewell at her absolute peak, and readers who arrive expecting the full structural precision of her very best work may find it sits slightly below that bar. The pacing is occasionally uneven in its middle sections, and some of the plot's later developments require a degree of suspension of disbelief that the grounded earlier atmosphere does not entirely prepare you for. For readers who are already invested in the characters and the atmosphere by that point, which Jewell reliably ensures, these moments are easy to forgive. It Could Have Been Her is dark, atmospheric, and compulsively readable: exactly what it sets out to be, and more than sufficient reason to read it.

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This review is part of the Indian Book Club’s editorial initiative to spotlight books that inspire, inform, and leave a lasting impact on readers. Every title featured is carefully handpicked and reviewed by the IBC Editorial Team to maintain quality, authenticity, and literary value. If you are an author, publisher, or reader and would like to submit a book for review, we’d be delighted to hear from you. Please write to us at: editorial@indianbookclub.com Our team personally evaluates each submission, and selected books are featured as official IBC Editorial Reviews on our platform.