A dog with no owner shows up in the woods behind a crumbling English country house, and by the time its microchip is scanned, an entire buried life comes rattling back into daylight. That is the hook Lisa Jewell hangs her latest psychological thriller on, and it is a testament to her instincts that something as small as a lost terrier can crack open a twenty-six-year-old nightmare.
Jane Trevally has spent her adult life running from a single afternoon: the day, decades ago, she narrowly escaped being drugged and abducted from a London townhouse called Thornwood. Twice divorced, financially unsteady, and living alone with four dogs in a house that is falling down around her, Jane has built a quiet, guarded existence in the countryside. Then a runaway Westie turns up at her door, and its chip traces back to the very address she has spent half her life trying to forget. What follows is less a straightforward whodunit than an excavation, as Jewell toggles between the terrified twenty-something Jane once was and the wary, watchful woman she has become, closing in on the house’s secrets from both ends of the timeline at once.
Jewell’s real skill here is atmosphere. Thornwood is written as its own character, a place that seems to absorb the sins committed inside it and let them curdle for decades, and the novel leans hard into Gothic tradition, complete with locked rooms, unreliable memories, and the sense that the walls themselves are keeping score. The dual timeline structure, jumping between “then” and “now,” lets the book build dread gradually rather than through cheap jump scares, and Jane herself is drawn with real sympathy: a woman shaped by trauma into serial self-erasure, who has to relearn how to trust her own recollections before she can trust anyone else’s account of what happened. It is a slower burn than some of Jewell’s earlier hits, but the patience pays off in a final stretch that is genuinely unsettling.
Critical response has been largely admiring, with reviewers calling it among the most disquieting entries in Jewell’s catalog and praising how deliberately she withholds the full picture of what occurred at Thornwood until the closing chapters. The most common reservation, echoed across several outlets, is structural: the constant shuffling between time periods and points of view can blur together in the middle third, and readers who prefer their thrillers linear may find themselves flipping back to reorient. Even those critics, though, tend to agree the payoff justifies the disorientation, and the book has climbed onto multiple bestseller lists since its June release, a sign the trade-off is working for most readers.
For anyone who likes their suspense steeped in atmosphere rather than delivered in short, sharp shocks, It Could Have Been Her is a rewarding, occasionally maddening puzzle box of a novel. It won’t convert readers who need a single clean thread to follow, but for Jewell’s existing audience, and for newcomers who enjoy a house with secrets, this is one of her most confident and creeping books yet. Recommended, with a warning to keep track of your timelines.
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