Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney

Beautiful Ugly

By Alice Feeney

Flatiron Books 2025

Alice Feeney’s new novel Beautiful Ugly starts on a wonderfully strong note: a beautifully-designed US cover by Will Staehle. And things move to another strong note: the book opens with the kind of dramatic hook any author would trade 60 hours of pointless Instagram scrolling to think up.

It goes like this: Grady Green is a nervous, overwrought, needy author (in other words, an author) who’s waiting for word from his editor and agent that his latest book has officially reached on The New York Times bestseller list, and he’s agitated that his wife Abby isn’t there to share the exciting moment with him. He’s simultaneously agitated that she doesn’t understand him: “Abby worries about how much time I spent on my own and doesn’t seem to understand that I prefer solitude,” he thinks. “I need quiet to write … Besides, I have my characters for company and prefer them to real people too.” Lovely guy.

He calls Abby, reaches her while she’s driving home, and gives her the happy news. She’s ecstatic, and she’s congratulating Grady on his success when the finishing touch of this terrific dramatic twist happens:

“I’m almost home,” she says, interrupting my mess of nostalgic thoughts. “Take the champagne out and –”

I hear the sound of screeching breaks, then silence.

“What’s happened?” I ask. “Are you okay? Can you hear me?”

The silence continues, but then I hear her voice again. “I’m fine, but … there’s a woman lying in the road.”

“What? Did you hit her?”

“No! Of course not. She was already there, that’s why I stopped,” Abby says.

“Where are you now?”

“I’m on the cliff road. I’m going to get out and see if –”

“No!” I shout.

“What do you mean, no? I can’t leave her lying in the lane, she might be hurt.”

“Then call the police. You’re almost home. Do not get out of the car.”

Every reader eagerly gobbling up that moment knows what’s coming next: Abby is indeed going to get out of her car … and she’s not going to come back. At the moment of his greatest triumph, Grady finds himself in a freakish nightmare: his wife has disappeared. There’s no trace of her out on the lonely stretch of road where she stopped.

As an opening gambit for a contemporary thriller, this is mighty good stuff. In the 20th century, the reader’s natural next question would have been: How will the author pay this off? In the 21st century, alas, the question instead is: How will the author screw this up?

In defense of Alice Feeney, it takes her a while, more than half the book, to screw things up. In fact, she’s got one more nifty twist in store: when Grady, broken and lost, travels to the tiny Scottish island of Amberly to recover and perhaps rekindle his writing, he spots a woman in the distance who seems like a, you should pardon the expression, dead ringer for Abby. Is it possible his vanished wife is living under a new identity on this island where Grady is the only man?

He learns from the local gossip that a year before Grady’s arrival, a strange woman arrived on the island and never left, just seemed to vanish. Was this Abby? And all the odd little things suddenly happening to Grady on the island, are they somehow connected? And what about Charles Whittaker, the island’s previous male writer? How does his writing – and his death of seeming suicide – figure into all this? When Grady receives the contractually obligatory cryptic warning from a stranger in a graveyard, Feeney is clearly trying her level best to pump up the suspense levels.

Something like that might have worked, if Feeney had opted for any of the half-dozen plot resolutions that will come to the mind of any veteran thriller reader. The resolution Feeney cooks up instead is remarkably unsatisfying, an ungainly combination of cheesy fantasy and shrill TED talk. Readers should be warned: despite all the good will in the world, their enjoyment of Ugly Beautiful is likely to reach its peak at the book’s half-way point.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News