Becky's Great Book Reviews Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney

The premise of Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney is captivating. Grady Green's wife disappears one day in the middle of a phone call to him while driving home. Her car is found in the middle of the road, but not Abby Green.

In the next year Grady proceeds to unravel. Not able to write anything since Abby's disappearance, Grady's one best-seller stands alone, and he is left with not much more than his dog. His agent makes him an offer: stay in a cabin she owns that once belonged to famous author Charles Whitaker; he can focus on writing his next big book there. The caveat? It's on a remote island off the coast of Scotland. Grady takes the offer.

The beautiful but tiny island has only twenty-five permanent residents. There are strange vibes: he begins to receive copies of his wife's articles she wrote during her investigative reporting career left in his cabin. Grady finds that it's going to be difficult to leave when he's ready because no one seems to want to tell him when the ferries run and there's no internet or phone lines. He also begins to think he sees glimpses of his wife from a distance and thinks maybe his grief is driving him crazy.

Grady finds what looks like the bones of a hand under the floorboards of the cabin. He also finds an unpublished manuscript of Charles Whitaker. Still struggling with writing, Grady decides that with some editing he can pass it off as his own.

Interspersed through Beautiful Ugly are chapters with Abby's point of view before her disappearance. We begin to learn the relationship between Grady and Abby is not what Grady thought it was. At one point the island sheriff says, "most people are contradictions of themselves", and this point is underlined as the narrative moves along.

Whiplash inducing and mysterious, this reader was wondering what the hell was going on until almost the very end. The bait and switch techniques used in this novel started to become slightly frustrating, but this reader was still intrigued. I give Alice Feeney's atmospheric Beautiful Ugly four stars out of five.