Rock Paper Scissors

Rock Paper Scissors by Alice Feeney is a standalone psychological thriller published in September 2021, her fourth novel, a New York Times bestseller, and a Book of the Month Club selection. A Netflix adaptation has been confirmed and is in development, adding to Feeney's growing catalogue of screen-optioned work.

Things have been wrong with Mr and Mrs Wright for a long time. Adam is a Hollywood screenwriter, known for adapting the novels of his favourite author, Henry Winter - an obsession his wife has never fully understood and increasingly resents. Adam has also lived with prosopagnosia - face blindness - his entire life, meaning he cannot recognise faces: not his colleagues, not his friends, and not his wife. Every year on their anniversary, Amelia writes Adam a letter that she has never given him to read. When they win a weekend away to Blackwater Chapel, a converted church set deep in the Scottish Highlands at the end of a valley road, their marriage counsellor's advice to try something different seems like the obvious thing to do. By the time the snowstorm closes in and the lights go out, it becomes clear that whoever arranged for them to be here had something very specific in mind.

The Unreliable Narrator device Feeney builds around Adam is her most structurally inventive to date. A man who cannot recognise faces cannot be entirely certain whether the people around him are who they claim to be, and Feeney exploits that vulnerability with considerable care - not as a gimmick, but as a genuine narrative framework that accumulates implications the further the novel progresses. Who Adam thinks he has spoken to, and who was actually there, becomes a question the reader cannot answer with confidence until very late in the book, and Feeney plants the clues fairly rather than relying on pure misdirection.

The Multiple POV structure operates across three distinct voices: Adam's present-tense account of the weekend, Amelia's own parallel perspective on the same events, and the anniversary letters she has never sent - epistolary chapters that span a decade of their relationship and tell a love story that looks considerably different in retrospect from how it appeared at the time. A mysterious third presence - Robin, a reclusive woman living in the cottage attached to the chapel - adds a fourth element to the escalating Deception, one that reframes the central couple's relationship in ways neither of them anticipated.

The Complicated Romance between Adam and Amelia is built on a decade of genuine history, professional resentment, reproductive grief, and Adam's Obsession & Desire for his work that has repeatedly displaced his marriage. Feeney doesn't reduce either of them to a simple victim or villain - both carry Dark Secrets substantial enough to shift the reader's sympathies repeatedly across a relatively short book. The atmosphere of Blackwater Chapel, rendered with real gothic atmosphere, does considerable work: the isolation, the crypt beneath the building, the nearby graveyard, and the unexplained noises in the night give the domestic thriller its spookiest setting since Daisy Darker.

The Twist Ending has been widely praised - there are, by reader consensus, at least four significant reversals across the final third, and Feeney lands the majority of them cleanly rather than piling them past the point of credibility. For readers who consider His & Hers the pinnacle of her craft, this is most often placed just beneath it; for readers who came to Feeney through Daisy Darker and are working backwards, it's the book that shows the Scottish highland setting was a long-standing obsession rather than a one-off choice.