Often, when people first meet Alice Feeney, they assume she’s a children’s author. The British bestseller is partial to floral prints, and her voice has the high, girlish resonance of actor Mia Goth. “I think we’re all guilty of still judging people and books by their covers,” Feeney says via Zoom, clad in a Peter Pan collar and seated in front of an Alice in Wonderland mural at her home in Devon, England.
But make no mistake: Feeney does not write books well-suited for classroom readalouds. Since 2011, she’s published six pitch-black thrillers with titles like Daisy Darker (2022) and Good Bad Girl (2023), each one bubbling over with unreliable narrators, heinous murder methods, and all manner of bad relationships. That Feeney lives in a whimsical 16th-century thatch cottage and pauses midsentence more than once to admire her off-screen black labrador, Boots, is simply bright icing on a bitter cake.
Feeney’s seventh novel, Beautiful Ugly (Flatiron), hits shelves in January. It’s a fevered chiller about mystery author Grady Green, whose wife, investigative reporter Abby, disappears the same night he lands his first-ever spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Grief-stricken, Grady starts circling the drain to such a degree that his no-nonsense London agent ships him off to a remote Scottish island in hopes that he’ll crank out a new book from a cabin once kept by a now deceased client.
This being a thriller and a Feeney novel, secrets abound. When Grady finally catches a ferry to the mysterious Isle of Amberley, he swears he sees Abby onboard. There’s no cell service or internet to speak of on the island—the residents all communicate via walkie-talkie—and soon, Grady notices strange behaviors among the wildlife. His cabin is full of grim tokens that suggest the prior inhabitant might have met an untimely end. Most worrisome of all, none of the frosty locals seem prepared to let Grady return to the mainland—ever.
The book’s spark first came to Feeney after a mishap during one of her yearly trips to Scotland. “I was stuck in the Outer Hebrides—these tiny, lonely islands as far north and west as you can be off of the coast, which you can only get to by ferry,” Feeney recalls. Nothing particularly traumatic came from the experience, but the storytelling potential was undeniable. “With the weather and the storms, it often means that things go wrong.”
Born in 1978, Feeney grew up in Essex, but she remains curiously tight-lipped about her family and early life. When asked about her parents, she pauses, then says simply, “I had an interesting childhood.”
And while she may choose to keep some aspects of her past a secret, it’s fair to say that she’s long harbored a fascination with things going wrong. A sterling student, she was regularly invited to her primary school’s annual prize-giving ceremonies, where most kids would trade in the capital of their academic achievements for a sensible atlas or a stack of encyclopedias. Feeney went straight for the Stephen King paperbacks, much to the alarm of the adults in the room.
Whatever horrors she absorbed from The Stand or Salem’s Lot, however, were no match for the brutal crash course in human darkness that constituted her 15 years at the BBC. As a teenager with an active imagination and a pronounced sense of justice, she resolved to spend her adult life improving what she saw as a deeply unfair world. The best way to do that, she decided, was to pursue a career in either politics or journalism. “In the end, I thought journalism had more of a chance of changing the world—deep feelings for a teenager, I know,” she says with a smirk.
After working a number of odd jobs at elder care facilities and French pubs, Feeney got a position at the BBC when she was 21. These days, when she discusses her time at the network, she usually focuses on what she deems “the fun bits.” She spent a year as an arts and entertainment producer, for example, chasing Steven Spielberg down red carpets and interviewing Madonna at swanky hotels. But she spent most of her tenure at the main news desk, puzzling out the most palatable way to present each day’s horrors. “If there was a particular terror attack, part of my job would be to package that story up for millions of people to watch at lunchtime,” Feeney recalls. “I had to watch the footage as it came in and decide what everybody else could handle seeing. I’d be in the edit suite watching it happen, sometimes live, hearing people screaming, and then at the end of the footage, it would be silence.”
Field reporting wasn’t much sunnier. Particularly haunting was a home interview with a woman whose 13-year-old daughter had been raped and murdered. The segment taped in January, and the woman’s Christmas tree was still up; Feeney recalls spotting a single unopened present for the long-dead daughter beneath its branches. “When people ask me why I write about such dark things, I always think, I could never write anything that is more horrific than the things people do to each other in real life,” the author says. “The writing of these stories is my way of trying to make sense of a world that increasingly doesn’t make any sense to me.”
For most of her time at the BBC, Feeney wrote fiction in secret. Part of it was therapy; part of it was an attempt to recapture the magic of those Stephen King paperbacks. Never did she think she could turn it into a full-fledged career, even as she longed to leave journalism after discovering that her dreams of changing the world with a byline may have been far-fetched. Following the completion of a few manuscripts, she started submitting to agents. After 10 years of steady rejections, she got a bite from Jonny Gellar at Curtis Brown and signed on with him in 2016.
Three of Feeney’s first six books—Sometimes I Lie (2018), His & Hers (2020), and Rock Paper Scissors (2021)—are being adapted for TV, and each new novel arrives on a wave of breathless blurbs from Feeney’s crime fiction peers alluding to her as the Queen of Twists. It’s a nickname, Feeney stresses, that she did not cook up herself. But her novels do, like clockwork, end with jolting rug pulls, in part because Feeney conceives of them primarily as “roller coasters,” with a desire to offer her readers maximum thrills.
The particulars of Beautiful Ugly’s signature sucker punch shifted as she was revising the novel. While Feeney clarifies that Beautiful Ugly wasn’t one of her “naughty books”—that is, one that took years to complete, like Daisy Darker—she overhauled the original ending after a book event in Macedonia earlier this year. She had already completed a few drafts of the novel, its Wicker Man–by-way-of-marital-strife nastiness turned all the way up, when a 12-year-old girl approached her and expressed her excitement for the book’s release. As Feeney signed her way through the young fan’s stack of paperbacks, she suddenly imagined the original ending through the middle schooler’s eyes.
“I wanted her to understand that there was a reason why the residents of Amberley behaved the way that they did,” Feeney says, “because there is always a reason why. I always think whatever you’re doing, wherever you’re going, even if you see someone behav-
ing in a bad way on a train, there’s a reason why that person is behaving the way they are.”
“There’s always something going on underneath,” she continues with a glint in her eye, steeping the room in subtext. “There’s always a story, if you’re willing and able to look for it.”
