What happens when you give a reader three unreliable women, two decades of secrets, and narrators who sound like they might be the same person?
I was chopping onions for a chana masala at 9 PM on a Tuesday — already emotionally compromised, let's be honest — when Alice Feeney's Good Bad Girl started doing that thing she does. You know the thing. The slow, deliberate laying of narrative traps that you can see coming and still walk into anyway. Eighty-year-old Edith, stuck in a nursing home she was "tricked" into, planning her escape. Patience, the cleaner who's lying about everything. Clio, the estranged daughter. A stolen baby from twenty years ago. And someone is about to die.
The protagonist — well, all three of them — exhibit classic patterns of self-protective deception. Which is psychologically sound, actually. When people have been betrayed, they don't just stop trusting others; they construct elaborate false selves. Feeney gets this. Patience in particular is a fascinating case study in performed identity — she's cleaning toilets in a care home while hiding something so fundamental about herself that when the reveal hits, you have to recalibrate everything you assumed about her motivations. I found myself asking: why does Patience really attach herself to Edith? Is it genuine affection, or is this the kind of instrumental bonding we see in attachment theory when someone's primary relationships have catastrophically failed?
Three Women, Two Voices, One Problem
Here's where I have to be honest about the audio experience. Katherine Press and Stephanie Racine each take different characters, which should create a clean division between perspectives. Should. The issue — and this is not a minor one for a mystery built on "who is lying to whom" — is that their voices are pretty similar. Like, "wait, who's talking now?" similar. During a few of the conversations between characters, I genuinely lost track of which woman was speaking, and in a book where identity and deception are the entire point, that's a structural problem for the audiobook format.
Racine, to her credit, does atmospheric work well. There's a tension in her pacing during the nursing home scenes — the way she slows down when Edith is remembering things, when the timeline is shifting backward — that builds genuine unease. Press handles the present-day thriller elements capably. But a third narrator, or more vocal differentiation between the two, would've transformed this from a decent listen into something much more immersive.
I'll say this: the narration dragged me through a first act that was, admittedly, a little disorienting. The slow start isn't necessarily bad — Feeney is setting up her dominos, and she needs you confused — but the combination of early confusion plus similar narrator voices means you really cannot listen to this while doing anything requiring actual brain power. I tried during my morning jog and had to give up and restart the last twenty minutes at my desk with headphones and full concentration.
The Psychology of Feeney's Twists
What makes Feeney interesting as a thriller writer — and what separates her from the assembly-line domestic suspense crowd — is that her twists aren't just plot mechanics. They're character reveals. When the connections between Edith, Patience, and Clio become clear, it recontextualizes not just the events but the relationships. The research actually shows that our brains process narrative twists differently depending on whether they're situational ("the killer was in the house!") or psychological ("this person's entire motivation was different than you thought"). Feeney deals in the latter, and that's harder to pull off.
That said — psychologically, some of the character behavior doesn't fully track for me. There are moments where people make choices that serve the plot twist rather than emerging from consistent internal logic. A few conversations felt incomplete, like the dialogue was trimmed for pacing and lost its psychological coherence in the process. My therapist would have thoughts about at least one character's abrupt behavioral shift in the back half.
The ending is... fine. Not her strongest. Daisy Darker set a high bar for Feeney's reveals, and Good Bad Girl doesn't quite reach it. But I'd argue the journey here — specifically Edith's arc, an eighty-year-old woman fighting for autonomy while carrying decades of guilt — is worth more than the destination.
Who Gets the Most Out of This
If you love identity-driven mysteries and don't mind working a little to keep characters straight, this is a solid pick. If you're coming in expecting another Daisy Darker, calibrate downward slightly. And if you're a multitasker — if you listen while driving or cooking or pretending to answer emails — skip the audiobook and grab the print version. This one demands your focus, full stop.
For the psychology nerds: the exploration of maternal bonds, stolen identity, and the lies we tell to survive? That's the real story here. The murder mystery is just the vehicle. Anthony Horowitz pulls off something adjacent in The Word Is Murder — using the mechanics of a whodunit to excavate something far more interesting about ego, obsession, and the performance of identity.
The Case File, Closed
Alice Feeney understands that the most interesting mysteries aren't about who did it — they're about why anyone becomes the kind of person who could. Good Bad Girl isn't her best work, but it's a book that respects the complexity of damaged women, and I'll take that over a perfect plot any day. Just... maybe invest in the print copy if you're easily confused by similar voices. I say this with love and the memory of rewinding three separate times during chapter twelve.
