It Could Have Been Her
A Novel
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4.4 • 10 Ratings
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Then She Was Gone Lisa Jewell, two women's lives converge in a house containing devastating secrets that refuse to stay buried in this "deliciously dark, devilishly addictive" (Alice Feeney, bestselling author of My Husband's Wife) novel.
Jane Trevally is walking her dogs on her country estate when a small white terrier appears, alone and with no sign of the teenaged girl he’d been staying with nearby. When the teenager is reported missing, Jane offers to return the dog to his registered owner, hours away in London. Arriving at a run-down house called Thornwood in the deepest backwaters of Hampstead, she is immediately on alert—because Jane has a dark history with this house.
The man who answers the door is not the man that Jane remembers from her past. He is cagey, and claims to know nothing about the missing teenage girl. Then, through the window of the house, Jane catches a glimpse of a haunted-looking woman.
Conjuring her memories from twenty-five years ago, Jane knows this unsettling house holds the key—to the missing teenager, to her own traumatic story, and to the dark secrets of the past.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Thoughts of what might have been are restlessly inescapable in Lisa Jewell’s haunting thriller. Initially, finding a lost dog on her expansive property offers a welcome diversion for divorced and bored Jane Trevally. But the mystery that the pup touches off brings her face-to-face with a past encounter that could have ended much differently—with her own murder. Jewell doles out the horror in careful doses, letting the scope of what’s been happening to young women at a secluded house in an isolated London hamlet ooze out. We had chills as Jane is forced to viscerally confront the ways that others have been ensnared by the very same evil she avoided all those years ago. And yet through it all, Jewell still brings balance to the tale through the warmth of supporting characters like Jane’s stepson Dexter. It Could Have Been Her lays out a heinous scenario and follows the ripples to see just how far the damage extends.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jane Trevally, a supporting character in Jewell's 2025 thriller, Don't Let Him In, takes center stage in this chilling gothic suspense tale. At the outset, Jane is twice divorced and living in a ramshackle house in Dorset she can't quite summon the courage to leave. Her life changes after she finds a lost dog that neighbors tell her was last seen with a now missing young woman named Rose White. Jane decides to return the dog to the London home registered on its ID chip. When she arrives, the house—situated in the Vale of Health near Hampstead—reminds her of a haunting incident from her past. Then Stuart Tucker, the man who answers the door, claims not to know Rose, and Jane grows increasingly suspicious. She digs into Rose's background with the help of her youngest stepson, Dexter, and together, they unravel the dark history of the family who occupies the Vale of Health house, dredging up Jane's own buried traumas in the process. With a shrewd command of the narrative, Jewell turns a chance encounter into a disturbing treatise on the past's ability to assert itself in ways both unwelcome and unlikely. The author's fans will relish this pitch-black spine-tingler.
