Alice feeney has built a career on a very specific kind of promise, the promise that if you trust her, she will take you somewhere you did not see coming. Her best books, sometimes i lie, rock paper scissors, daisy darker, operate on the understanding that the ground under the story is not solid, that the narrator cannot entirely be trusted, that the shape of the novel is not what it appears to be until the final pages show you what it actually is. My husband's wife is feeney at the most ambitious version of that project, a book that begins with a premise that already sounds impossible and then spends three hundred pages making it more impossible before resolving it in a way that is both surprising and, in retrospect, entirely fair.
The opening image of eden returning home to find herself replaced is one of those premises that could go wrong in a dozen different ways. It could tip into the supernatural, into the merely symbolic, into a thriller that runs on genre energy without the intelligence to back it up. Feeney avoids all of these outcomes by doing something deceptively simple: she alternates between eden's present-day perspective and birdy's perspective from six months earlier, building the two storylines separately and letting the reader feel the gap between them widen before bringing everything together. The dual timeline is not new in psychological thrillers, but feeney uses it here with unusual precision, each strand withholding specific information in ways that are frustrating in exactly the right way, the frustration of sensing that you are close to something rather than the frustration of being kept arbitrarily in the dark.
Feeney is also one of the few thriller writers who makes her protagonists feel like real people rather than genre functions. Eden is prickly, occasionally self-absorbed, deeply talented, and not always likable, which makes her far more interesting to spend time with than a conventionally sympathetic victim. Birdy is the more emotionally available of the two, a woman facing death with a particular combination of stoicism and suppressed terror that is rendered with real sensitivity. The relationship between them, which develops slowly across the alternating chapters and is not what it initially appears to be, is the emotional core of the book, and it holds up far better than the mechanics of the plot alone would sustain.
If there is a weakness, it is that the sheer complexity of the plot requires a few coincidences and a few moments of suspended disbelief that more patient readers will notice. The machinery underneath the story occasionally shows through the surface, particularly in the second act, where certain events seem arranged to serve the plot's needs rather than emerging naturally from the characters' psychology. And feeney's relentlessly propulsive pacing, which is one of her great strengths, occasionally moves past emotional moments that the book would have benefited from inhabiting a little longer.
Spyglass itself deserves a specific mention. Feeney has always been good at atmosphere, at the feeling that a place is doing something to the people inside it, and the old cliffside manor in hope falls is one of her best settings. It has the quality of a house that has outlasted multiple lives and holds the residue of all of them. The devon setting, the sound of the sea, the particular quality of isolation that comes from being somewhere beautiful and slightly too remote, all of it is evoked without melodrama, which makes it more effective rather than less.
The twists, when they come, come fast and they come well. Feeney has a gift for the specific kind of misdirection that makes you feel clever for having nearly figured something out just before the rug is pulled, and that gift is fully deployed here.
