🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 2.4/5 | Steam: 🔥 | Standalone
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read It Could Have Been Her yet, go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
I wanted to like this one. I really did. Lisa Jewell has a solid track record and the premise here is genuinely compelling — a woman returns to a house where she almost didn’t make it out alive, and has to figure out what’s happening inside before someone else gets hurt. That is a great setup. I just think this book tried to do too many things at once and none of them came together the way they should have. By the time I was done, I felt like I had survived a circus. A dark, gothic, deeply overcrowded chaotic circus.
The Full Summary — Spoilers Included
Jane and the Dog That Started Everything
Jane Trevally is in her fifties, newly divorced, living a quiet life outside London with her dogs when a stray white terrier named Hugo wanders into her path near her country estate. He’s alone, with no sign of the teenager he’d apparently been staying with nearby. When the teenager is reported missing, Jane offers to return Hugo to his registered London owner and ends up hours away in Hampstead, pulling up to a decaying mansion called Thornwood.
Jane has history with this house. Twenty-five years earlier, dealing with something painful, she went out drinking and a charming man at a bar convinced her to come back to his place about a potential nanny job. She went. He got her a drink. She knocked it over and felt the energy shift immediately, told him she was going to leave. He wouldn’t hear it. She said she was stepping outside for a smoke. He demanded she stay. And then his wife — who had been quietly hovering — looked at Jane and said “let her go, the children are up.” Jane walked out that door and ran. She’s carried that night around like a near-miss story ever since, the time she probably would have been drugged and killed if she hadn’t gotten out. The same Jeep is still sitting in the driveway when she arrives with Hugo.
The man who answers the door this time is Stuart, not Allen. He’s cagey and claims to know nothing about any missing teenager, she must have stolen his dog. Through the window, Jane catches a glimpse of a haunted-looking woman. She knows something dark is still happening inside this house.
What’s Living Inside Thornwood Now
Allen Black’s daughter Jessamine is running things, and I use “running” very loosely. She’s volatile, erratic, and a serious alcoholic, and she is barely holding herself together. Stuart is her partner, a drifter who fell into a relationship with Jessamine and then could not figure out how to leave. He has money. He could go. But every time he tries to pull away, Jessamine threatens to hurt herself, and she’s isolated him from everyone in his life. Daisy has to create active distractions just so Stuart can slip out to have dinner with his own daughter. He’s not locked in by a key. He’s locked in by guilt and manipulation and complete emotional exhaustion.
Then there’s Annie, Allen’s wife, still in the house, still keeping up the code of silence she’s maintained for decades. And Daisy — raised to believe Jessamine is her mother, though Jessamine never once told her she loved her and always kept her at arm’s length. Daisy always sensed something was wrong about that.
What Allen Black Was Actually Doing
For years, Allen lured vulnerable women into Thornwood under the guise of nanny positions or offering them shelter, and then he drugged, assaulted, and imprisoned them in hidden rooms throughout the property. Annie knew about all of it and helped cover it up. One of his victims was Claire Connolly, a local girl who came to return the family’s stray cat and never made it back out. Allen imprisoned her, and she became pregnant. Jessamine, consumed by jealousy over her father’s obsession with Claire, eventually snapped and murdered both Allen and Claire. Then she took Claire’s newborn baby, named her Daisy, and told everyone the child was hers. Annie helped bury the bodies on the property and helped maintain the lie for decades.
Daisy Starts Pulling Threads
Daisy has been quietly trying to piece together the truth about her real mother. She tracks down her uncle Jasper, who ran off years ago to work with a traveling circus and positioned himself as the one Black who escaped clean. He tells her Claire was in the house the night he left and that Annie knows the full truth. When Daisy shares with him how hard her life has been, Jessamine emotionally absent and abusive, the atmosphere at Thornwood suffocating and strange, Jasper admits he ran away the night everything went down. And then, mid-conversation, he tries to run again. Daisy chases him. He turns around and tries to choke her, hands around her neck. Hugo bolts into the woods. Daisy fights free and runs. Stuart comes and picks her up, they drive around looking for Hugo for a while, and eventually they have to give up. He’s gone. This is where Jane found Hugo at the beginning of the book.
The Confrontation at the Top of the Stairs
Daisy goes back to Thornwood and confronts Annie directly, demanding the truth about Claire and about who she really is. Annie stonewalls. She won’t confirm anything and she won’t say that Claire is Daisy’s mother. Daisy loses it, and in the chaos of that fight at the top of the stairs, she pushes Annie. Annie falls down the stairs. Daisy, terrified by what just happened, flees.
Stuart and Daisy decide to hide the body and finally show Jane.
They bring Jessamine into it. She is upstairs immediately begging for a drink when they find her, just one little drink please, and they have to cut through that to tell her there’s been an accident. She tells them to say she pushed her mother and she will tell the police exactly why. When police arrive, Jessamine speaks. She tells them everything: “This is a house of horrors. My mother was evil. My mother killed my father, her mother and her father killed people.” And then she tells police that Annie killed Allen in a jealous rage, that Annie then killed Claire, and that Annie gave her the baby.
Jessamine’s story kept changing throughout this entire book, and I never fully trusted any version of it. The epilogue is what finally tells you what actually happened. It’s set eighteen years earlier and takes place in one of Jasper’s therapy sessions — EMDR — where we see what Jasper walked in on: Jessamine, having just killed Allen and Claire, telling Jasper that Claire killed Allen first so she had to kill Claire. And Jasper, standing there looking at two bodies, understood exactly what had happened. Jessamine killed both of them. She has been lying ever since.
Where Everyone Ends Up
Jessamine is arrested. She takes the fall for Annie’s death to protect Daisy and to keep control of the narrative one last time. The forensic sweep of Thornwood uncovers the hidden rooms, the buried remains, decades of Allen’s crimes laid bare. Daisy is cleared. She gets to leave the Black family name behind, mourn her real mother Claire, and build an actual life with her mother’s last name. Stuart walks out of Thornwood and reconnects with his daughter. Jane gets to finally put down the weight she’s been carrying since the night she ran from that bar.
Jasper is found dead in the woods six months later. Suicide.
And Hugo? Jane found him at the very beginning, wandering near her country estate, with no sign of the teenager he’d been with. That missing teenager was Daisy, who had fled Thornwood. Hugo had run off after Jasper attacked Daisy and ended up wandering back to where the whole story started. The loop closes itself, and honestly, that piece of construction is one of the more elegant things in this book.
The Ending Explained — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Disappointed, and I had low expectations by the time I got there. The ending ties everything up, and the Hugo detail closing the loop is clever, but by the final pages I was just ready to be done. Jessamine shifting her story over and over was less compelling unreliable-narrator territory and more exhausting. There are genuinely interesting threads buried in this book — Daisy’s arc, what Thornwood did to Stuart — but none of them got the space they needed to actually work. Too much happening at once, not enough room for any of it to breathe.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
Steam Rating: 🔥
No steam. This is a straight psychological thriller with nothing romantic going on. Content warnings for coercive control, imprisonment, assault, substance abuse, and generational trauma throughout.
Would I Relisten?
No. Not a chance. I would not put myself through this one again.
Who Is This For
If you are a Lisa Jewell completionist, you’re going to read it anyway and that’s fair. If you love gothic mysteries set in crumbling old houses with buried family secrets, multiple timelines, and a cast that keeps growing, this might actually work for you. Just know going in that you need a high tolerance for a lot happening at once, because this book does not let up.
Where to Get This Book
📚 Physical Book
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Bookshop.org
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📱 Ebook
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Genre: Mystery/Thriller | Standalone | Steam: 🔥
Questions
- Who is Daisy’s father? Allen Black. Her mother is Claire Connolly, the last woman Allen held captive, not Jessamine.
- Ending explained, and how many killers are there? Allen preyed on young women he called “au pair girls,” and his wife Annie covered for him. Police find the remains of Allen and seven women under his study.
- Who killed Allen and Claire? Jessamine killed Claire. I am uncertain on Allen, researching it turns up different opinions: one says Claire stabbed him with a knife Jasper smuggled in, another says that’s only Jessamine’s version, and one says Jessamine killed both. How Allen died really depends on whose account you trust.
- What happened to Daisy? She’s the missing girl. She became convinced Claire was her mother and tracked down her uncle Jasper, who attacked her in the woods. She then hid back at Thornwood with Stuart’s help.
- Who killed Annie? Daisy pushed her down the stairs during an argument, and Stuart hid the body. Jessamine confessed to it, apparently to protect Daisy, but the epilogue shows her confessions can’t be fully trusted.
- What happened to Jasper? His body is found in the woods six months later, and it’s ruled a likely suicide. He had worked as “Patch the Clown” and had been scaring young women at night. The epilogue reveals he saw Jessamine kill Claire.
- Is Stuart good or bad? Mostly good. He put up with Jessamine to stay a parent figure for Daisy, then moves out at the end.
- What happens to Jane? She sells Rosebery Hall and plans a private investigation agency with Dexter called “Trevally and Son.”