Good Bad Girl

Good Bad Girl by Alice Feeney is a standalone psychological thriller published in August 2023, her sixth novel and the book most often compared, in tone and structure, to Daisy Darker - warmer and less relentlessly dark than her earlier work, more interested in the complicated bonds between women than in a single twist designed to detonate at the end.

Twenty years ago, a baby was stolen from a supermarket and never found. In the present day, a woman is murdered in Windsor Care Home, and the two events are linked - though exactly how takes the novel considerable time to make clear, which is precisely the kind of sustained mystery Feeney builds well. Four women sit at the centre of the story. Frankie is a thirty-eight-year-old librarian at a women's prison, alone in a way she has learned not to examine too closely. Patience is eighteen, working at the care home and lying to almost everyone she meets about who she is and where she came from. Clio is fifty-something and estranged from her mother, Edith - who is eighty years old, convinced she has been tricked into the care home by her own daughter, and, at this stage in the story, primarily focused on getting out of it.

Edith is the reason most readers keep reading. While Motherhood and its long consequences form the novel's real subject - every character's trajectory traces back to a mother's decision, a mother's failure, or a mother's loss - it's Edith who provides the book's warmth and much of its dry humour, planning her escape with the determination of someone who is not going to let an inconvenient thing like a nursing home stop her from sorting this out herself. Her alliance with Patience, built on mutual recognition that the other is hiding something and decided willingness not to address it directly, is the book's most genuinely touching relationship.

The Multiple Timelines structure alternates between the present-day investigation and events from two decades earlier, with Feeney gradually uncovering the connections between all four women in a way that requires readers to trust the process before everything resolves. The Multiple POV structure - all four women plus a detective - has been the most common source of early confusion among readers, who consistently report that the characters settle into clarity after the first quarter; the recommendation across reviews is to let it breathe rather than stop early.

What marks this as a departure from Sometimes I Lie and Rock Paper Scissors is how it treats the Twist Ending. The reveals here are less a single, structural inversion designed to reframe everything and more a series of accumulating Dark Secrets that build toward an emotionally satisfying rather than conceptually shocking finale - Feeney is less interested in making readers gasp than in making them feel the weight of what these women have carried. The Trauma and Healing running through the book is handled with more care than in some of her earlier work, and the Mystery and Secrets Revealed is built around questions of why as much as who.

Reception has been warm among longtime Feeney readers, with the most common caveat being the slower opening pace - those who pushed through it are largely delighted with how the threads eventually come together.