Search for terrier’s missing owner uncovers strange family’s dark secrets

The latest psychological thriller by Lisa Jewell is a dark and intricately spun web of suspense and deception, beginning with a woman trying to reunite a lost dog with its owner and evolving into her trying to uncover the truth about a terrifying event from her past — and the strange family that was part of it.

Jewell is a bestselling author of 24 novels including Don’t Let Him In, None of This is True, The Family Upstairs and Then She Was Gone. The British author’s novels have sold more than 15 million copies worldwide and have been translated into over 30 languages.

She possesses a unique ability to build tension while creating a complex mosaic of characters and stories. It Could Have Been Her is a slow-burn thriller that keeps readers guessing how it all unfolds right until the very end.

The novel begins with Jane Trevally, a twice-divorced dog lover and aspiring private investigator, who finds a lost terrier named Hugo in the countryside and travels to London to return him to his owner. She’s shocked when she discovers Hugo lives at Thornwood Manor, a rambling estate where Jane experienced a frightening encounter decades earlier.

She recalls narrowly escaping Thornwood’s sinister owner: “Jane had felt a pulse of something wrong then, a distant siren in her consciousness warning of her something she could not quite put her finger on,” Jewell writes.

Stuart, the current owner of Thornwood, denies knowing anything about Hugo’s disappearance or the missing woman who was with the dog

Jane becomes determined to find out what happened to the missing woman, “her gut telling her that can’t possibly be the end of it, that a young woman called Rose White could not appear in the middle of the countryside with a dog that she had either stolen or found in North London and then disappears a few days later, leaving her dog to wander into Jane’s bluebell woods.”

Jewell then takes the reader to Stuart’s perspective some 10 years earlier, where he meets Jessamine Black and her dog Hugo at a pub and becomes involved with the lonely, troubled mother, the “tragic pretty woman with the strange lace-up shoes, the undyed gray hairs running through her mousy bob, the shimmer of mauve lipstick that makes her look as if she just got out of a cold swimming pool.”

The more Jane uncovers in her search for the missing woman, and her ties to Thornwood Manor and the Black family, the more it becomes apparent the family has been hiding something evil for decades.

Jane becomes resolute to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding the dysfunctional family. “What started as an obsession with finding the girl who disappeared from Helen’s annex has turned into an obsession with Thornwood and the Blacks,” Jewell writes.

The novel’s point of view shifts between Jane, Stuart and a cast of other supporting characters, including members of the Black family. The characters are deeply flawed and engaging, but the extensive cast and multiple plots and timelines can at times make the story difficult and tedious to follow.

Jenna Boholij is a Winnipeg writer with an affinity for nature and all things Icelandic. Her debut novel Lucid was published in 2024 by Dreamsphere Books, find her @jbird_photos.