His & Hers

His & Hers by Alice Feeney is a standalone psychological thriller published in July 2020, her third novel, a New York Times bestseller, and the book most often named by her readers as the one that made them realise exactly what kind of writer they were dealing with. Adapted as a Netflix series in 2026 starring Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal, it remains the strongest distillation of everything Feeney does - unreliable perspective, layered backstory, and a structural audacity that keeps readers wrong-footed right to the final page.

The setup is compact. Anna Andrews has spent years becoming a BBC news presenter, putting work before everything else including her marriage - a marriage to Jack Harper that ended messily enough that neither of them has moved past it. When Anna's colleague returns from maternity leave and bumps her back to reporting, she is sent to cover the murder of a woman in Blackdown, the Surrey village where she grew up. Jack is the detective heading the investigation. It takes them approximately five minutes to establish that neither of them wants the other anywhere near this case. What takes considerably longer to establish is whether either of them can be trusted to tell the truth about why.

Feeney structures the novel across three perspectives. His chapters follow Jack - a crumpled, decent detective retreating from something that happened at the Met, hiding a connection to the victim he knows makes him look terrible. Her chapters follow Anna - a high-functioning alcoholic whose apparent fragility conceals a sharper, more self-aware intelligence than she lets most people see. The third perspective, printed in italics, belongs to an unnamed narrator whose relationship to the other characters and the murders is the central mystery - short, unsettling chapters that read like the inside of a mind with a plan. All three narrators are unreliable. None of them are lying in exactly the same way.

The Small Town with Dark Underbelly mechanics Feeney deploys in Blackdown are grounded in something real: the village's surface of quiet English respectability sits above a history of harm to its young women that has been collectively managed, minimised, and not spoken about for years. Anna's reluctance to come home at all is connected to what happened to her as a teenager, and Feeney handles the Trauma and Healing running through the novel with a seriousness that stops it from feeling exploitative - this is the wound from which everything else in the story bleeds, and the Murder Mystery in the present is inseparable from it. The book carries genuine content weight beneath its thriller structure, and readers who want to check content warnings before going in are advised to do so.

The Complicated Romance between Anna and Jack - two people who clearly still know each other with the specificity that only comes from years of shared damage - gives the book real emotional texture alongside its puzzle mechanics. The Mystery and Secrets Revealed builds with careful, patient pacing rather than a single late inversion, and the Twist Ending has been among the most consistently praised in Feeney's catalogue: structurally satisfying, genuinely surprising, and emotionally earned by the story's real concerns rather than deployed purely for shock.

By reader consensus, this is one of Feeney's two or three finest books - the right entry point for anyone who wants to understand exactly what she is capable of, and a book that justifies the Netflix adaptation's existence simply by holding up under the scrutiny that comes with it.