BookLife Review: Beautiful Ugly (Alice Feeney, author) by Carol O’Day

Mystery, thriller, missing or disappeared person, remote Scottish island, British novelist, British journalist, female society, tragedy, grief, recovery, hallucinations and ghosts

If you crave a dark and twisty read with hallucinations and ghosts, a missing wife, and a creepy island setting, Beautiful Ugly is for you. There are ominous hints to the plot line along the way. The title references the narrator’s belief that marriage is made up of a million beautiful and ugly moments, stitched together in a tapestry. The couple at the heart of the novel end their days together wishing each other “I hope you die in your sleep,” ostensibly a wish of deepest love and compassion-not wanting one another to suffer even in death. But is it?

Grady Green is a British novelist married to Abby, a British investigative journalist. When the novel opens Grady is awaiting a call from his agent to learn whether his latest novel has achieved New York Bestseller list status. Abby is en route to the house and Grady is slightly irritated by her tardiness as he wants to receive the news together with her. He calls her mobile phone and learns she is close by, but she spies a body in the road and stops. Grady begs her not to get out of the car, but to call emergency services instead. She ignores his plea, gets out of the car with the phone still on speaker, and disappears into the mist. Her coat is discovered nearby, down river days later, but no body is found.

Grady is bereft with grief and confounded by the lack of information about what happened to Abby. He spirals, cannot write, loses his home and moved into a shady hotel. His agent beseeches him to make use of a writer's cottage on Amberly Island off the northern shore of Scotland. Grady packs his bags and his trusty Labrador retriever and heads to the retreat, hoping to find his muse. However, on the ferry and on the island when he arrives he believes he sees Abby. Each time she escapes his grasp, and he begins to believe his mind is playing tricks on him.

Grady must surrender his car at the ferry and is at the mercy of the 25 year-round residents of the island to deliver him to the cottage and help him navigate island life, supplies and its weather and forests. Island inhabitants are reclusive and private, but gradually Grady meets several. He grows wary when he notices that all of the residents of the island are female, and they all carry walkie-talkies, purportedly because there is little to no cell or phone service on the island. Things get creepier when copies of past articles written by Abby appear periodically under his door. Next he suspects a person or person is peeping into his windows, and he finds the skeleton of a hand and the prior deceased writer’s last, unpublished manuscript under the cottage’s floorboards. Because he suffers insomnia, keeps convinces himself that he is imagining things in his exhaustion. He decides to coopt the manuscript he discovered in the cottage and edit it into a work of his own.

He buckles down and writes feverishly, completes a draft and sends it off to his agent. Secrets of the island’s past tragedies seep out of the fog however and things grow “curiouser and curiouser.” The non-working phone booth suddenly has a signal and then it is lost. Return ferry service to the mainland ceases altogether, due to “currents and weather conditions.” Grady encounters a woman who appears to be his wife’s doppelganger, but her name is Aubrey and she has brown eyes and is a potter, married to someone else on the island. All of the residents of the island wear the same thistle ring.

The truth is revealed in pieces. Early in the novel, Feeney introduces flashback chapters where Abby met with a therapist and we learn that she is unhappy and lonely in the marriage, considering leaving Grady. Later, when Grady’s agent arrives on the island, and he learns she had ulterior motives for sending him to the Scottish cabin, and that she has a long, and tortured history on the island herself, as does Abby, who is in fact still alive, and on the island. The islanders have a proposal for Grady, and one he cannot, literally, refuse. The twists at the end of the book are complex and a bit contorted, but they do cause the book to race to its end, which is even darker than one might imagine. If you are hankering for a dark thriller with ghost story vibes, where no one is who they appear to be, Beautiful Ugly is for you.

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