His and Hers: Who is the liar?

What is this about?: Anna and her ex Jack are drawn together when a woman in their small home town is murdered. And then another is killed. What’s the connection?

What else is this about?: Take the tagline to heart: someone is always lying in this book, and it makes for compulsive reading.

Blurb

If there are two sides to every story, someone is always lying…

Jack: Three words to describe my wife: Beautiful. Ambitious. Unforgiving.
Anna: I only need one word to describe my husband: Liar.

When a woman is murdered in Blackdown village, newsreader Anna Andrews is reluctant to cover the case. Anna’s ex-husband, DCI Jack Harper, is suspicious of her involvement, until he becomes a suspect in his own murder investigation.

Someone is lying, and some secrets are worth killing to keep.

His and Hers by Alice Feeney is an example of a superb unreliable narrator if ever there was one. Navigating Anna and Jack’s stories uncovers lie after lie, but Feeney manages to make readers wonder just who is the killer.

His and Hers: dual chapters, dual liars

When the book opens, Anna and Jack are divorced, living in different cities and Anna is for the first time in a long time kinda, sort of content — her marriage may be over, but her career is where she wants it to be. If her happiness is accompanied by reaching the bottom of a bottle, she doesn’t care, besides she knows how to hide that.

Jack is a cop in their small home town, saddled with a bunch of newbies as his staff, including one Priya Patel, who he suspects might be crushing on him. He does his best to navigate that, but all the while he’s having an affair with Rachel, a woman from their small town.

Through detailed His and Hers chapters, we are introduced to this former couple. They’re both kind of broken in different ways, split apart by the death of their daughter. I can’t deny they both make for compelling reading within this narrative. Feeney has created a world in which I truly couldn’t decide who to believe because she has skillfully peppered doubt through each of their chapters, making you wonder just what is going on.

When Rachel turns up dead, Jack finds himself investigating her death. Rachel also happens to be a former friend of Anna’s from high school. At that point, Anna begins to recall her friendship with Rachel in high school, and what it meant to her to have Rachel pick her to be a friend: Anna’s father left her mother and Anna, forcing her to switch schools and casting her as the new girl at a time she wanted nothing more than to fit in, and Rachel made that happen. But Rachel’s friendship came with conditions and Anna abided by them. 

When Jack begins to find evidence implicating him in Rachel’s murder, and in the ones following hers, he finds himself trying to investigate these murders and avoid getting caught. Then Anna is more directly brought into the case, instead of only reporting on it, and things take a different turn.

Feeney begins to unveil her ending, and I found myself being drawn into a different narrative entirely, because like I said in this book: someone is always lying. To themselves, to other characters and to readers.

His and Hers introduced me to a book of compelling characters and liars. It’s fabulous reading!