Lisa Jewell has built a career on quiet houses that turn out to be hiding something monstrous, and “It Could Have Been Her” gives her one of the quietest, prettiest covers of her career wrapped around one of her darkest stories yet.
Jane Trevally is walking her dogs on her country estate when a stray West Highland terrier turns up with no owner in sight. When a local teenager goes missing around the same time, Jane volunteers to track down the dog’s owner, a trail that leads her hours away to a rundown Hampstead house called Thornwood. The address stops her cold: it’s the same house she narrowly escaped, decades earlier, when she came terrifyingly close to being drugged and taken by a man named Allen Black. The man who answers the door now isn’t him, but the dog’s real owner, a young woman named Rose White, is nowhere to be found. Jane, now in her fifties and still carrying the weight of what almost happened to her at nineteen, decides she isn’t walking away this time, and starts digging into Rose’s disappearance and Thornwood’s history herself.
The novel’s structure is where Jewell does her best work, cutting between Jane’s present-day investigation and fragments of the past that recontextualize what readers think they understand about that house and the people connected to it. Jane herself is the book’s real strength: a woman shaped by trauma and long stretches of loneliness who is nonetheless sharp, funny, and stubborn enough to keep pulling at threads other people would leave alone. Jewell resists giving readers an easy villain or a tidy resolution, instead building toward reveals that land exactly when the tension can least bear waiting any longer.
Critical response has been strongly positive, with several reviewers ranking it among Jewell’s most unsettling work, a companion piece of sorts to her previous thriller “Don’t Let Him In,” continuing that book’s willingness to depict real human cruelty rather than softened, genre-friendly menace. Praise has centered on Jewell’s control of pacing and her refusal to let the story settle into comfort even when it seems to be heading toward relief, along with admiration for how the deceptively cozy cover art plays against the book’s genuinely disturbing subject matter. It debuted on the New York Times bestseller list, and Jane Trevally’s return from an earlier Jewell novel has given longtime readers an extra layer of investment in her fate.
“It Could Have Been Her” is not a comfortable read, and it isn’t meant to be. But for readers who want a psychological thriller with a genuinely formidable woman at its center and a plot that keeps recalibrating what you think you know, Jewell delivers one of her most confident, cutting books yet.
As an Amazon Associate, VIRA Broadcasting earns from qualifying purchases.