It Could Have Been Her by Lisa Jewell [Book Review]

Well, some houses just come with bad vibes baked into the foundation. Lisa Jewell is back with another puzzle-box thriller. Is it worth your time?

Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars

Lisa Jewell’s It Could Have Been Her is exactly the kind of twisty, unsettling mystery I expect from her. There are missing people, buried secrets, questionable memories, deeply dysfunctional families, and one house I would personally never enter without several witnesses and perhaps a priest.

A Very Familiar House

Jane Trevally is walking her dogs on her country estate when a small white terrier appears without the teenage girl who had been caring for him nearby.

When the girl is reported missing, Jane agrees to return the dog to his registered owner in London. That errand takes her to Thornwood, a tucked-away, run-down house.

Unfortunately, Jane knows this house.

The Past Is Never Really Past

Jewell is always good at giving her mysteries a darker edge beneath the plot twists. The book considers what trauma does to memory, and what happens when something you thought you had moved on from suddenly comes back again.

There’s an unsettling tension between what Jane remembers, what actually happened, and what she may have convinced herself happened simply because she needed to create a version of the story she could live with.

Nobody in This Family Is Doing Great

Underneath the missing-person mystery is an extremely dark family story involving abuse, addiction, secrecy, manipulation, and some very warped ideas about loyalty.

This is not a book full of people making healthy emotional choices.

And while that gives the novel real emotional weight, it also contributes to how relentlessly bleak the story becomes. There were moments when I wanted just a little more breathing room.

Still, Jewell does a good job showing how damage spreads through families. People learn versions of love, protection, and loyalty from the people around them, and sometimes those definitions are toxic.

A Lot of Story to Keep Straight

My biggest issue was the structure.

There are multiple timelines, perspectives, histories, and interconnected relationships, and while I usually enjoy that kind of storytelling, It Could Have Been Her occasionally felt like it was stretching itself too thin.

There were points when I had to stop and mentally reorganize who knew what, when something happened, and how one piece of the past connected to another.

That didn’t ruin the mystery, but it did interrupt the momentum. And with a thriller, momentum matters.

The good news is that Lisa Jewell is still Lisa Jewell. She knows how to plant questions, withhold just enough information, and make you suspicious of basically everyone until the pieces finally come together.

Even when I wasn’t completely sold on the structure, I wanted to know what happened.

Would I Recommend It Could Have Been Her?

Yes.

Lisa Jewell remains one of those authors I trust when I want a reliable, twisty mystery that will keep me guessing, and It Could Have Been Her absolutely delivered on that front.

It’s darker and more complicated than some readers may want, and I do think the multiple timelines occasionally make the story harder to follow than it needs to be. But I appreciated the central mystery, the unsettling atmosphere, and the fact that the suspense is tied to something more meaningful than simply figuring out who did what.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for an advanced reader’s copy. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.