Took me two days to read, a great story, read more like a family story for me than a thriller, and I think that's what kept me engaged, was quite twisty and turny with a satisfactory conclusion

I received this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve read of Alice Feeney so I was looking forward to this. Twenty years after a baby was snatched from a supermarket, things start to happen that seem to link several women in surprising ways.

It’s hard to review a thriller/mystery without risking a spoil of some kind. I will say that whenever I read Alice Feeney, I’m always pleasantly surprised that I’ve actually BEEN surprised.

The writing is engaging, the characters are well developed. There’s only really one, Patience, who I felt I didn’t get to know very well. A really enjoyable thriller.

This is my first Alice Feeney book although I do have a fair few on my TBR.

The story follows four women throughout who are all linked. Frankie works in the prison library and has lost her daughter. Edith’s daughter has abandoned her in a care home, where Patience works. Clio is Edith’s resentful daughter.

The connections between each character are unclear until much later in the book, and even when you think you’ve tied up who’s who and how each character was really interacting with the others it was quite far into the book!

I have Daisy Darker and Rock Paper Scissors, which would you recommend I read next?

Wow! Just finished this and to say I was hooked was an understatement, I was addicted, constantly looking for time to squeeze in ‘just a little bit more’ and have been dwelling on the plot since I finished.

Writing a review is a challenge, to make sure there are no spoilers, so I won’t talk about the brilliant plot, except to say I was enthralled with the skilful crafting of the many strands.

The characters are all well-developed and complex with intriguing back stories, each narrating their own perspective. When the story starts you read about each character separately and I began to worry I wouldn’t remember who was who, I needn’t have! The plot seamlessly moves between each as they start to overlap and interlink.

How Alice Feeney managed to draw these varied personalities into a fabulously convincing, startlingly great story is beyond me! Totally, absolutely recommend it!

I was so excited when I got approved for Good Bad Girl on NetGalley and the initial 25% of the book was most intriguing but as the story moved forward I could not make out where the plot is heading. The multiple POVs did not help either. Ideally this may be a good thing if readers are left guessing, but I felt that the author held onto her twists for too long. It kind of made the individual stories of the characters feel disjointed. The characters themselves don't create much of an impact on the reader's mind and few of their actions felt extreme to me. The author has handled the the complicated and multi faceted relationship between mothers and daughters well.

Edith, eighty years old and an ex-store detective, stays in a care home for elderly and has a strained relationship with her daughter, Clio. She is upset because her best friend in the facility , Aunty May, was found dead and Edith suspects it's a murder. She doesn't get along with the other residents and definitely not with the scheming and vile manager, Joy. The only person who helps her is the young employee, Patience, who smuggles Edith's pet dog and other items into the care home. Frankie is searching for her missing daughter but she does not know if her daughter wants to be found. The narration shifts between the POVs of these four women.

The story did have potential in the beginning and but somehow I felt that the multiple threads of this plot came together too late in the end. However I did enjoy reading the first half of the book and felt it was better than Daisy Darker.

A baby is taken from a supermarket. A mother searches for her run-away daughter. A woman tries to ensure her mother is looked after in the care home she has been placed in. All at different times, but these stories are connected…though we don’t see how until later.
Told from multiple points of view, this was a tricky story to get into. Spending so long not seeing all the connections meant I felt quite confused for large parts of the book. We know these tales - separated by about twenty years - are linked but we have to wait to find out how.
The character I found of most interest was Patience, mainly because we know she’s hiding something and we can start to unpick her story a little quicker. Unfortunately, the other characters weren’t that endearing and once we actually learn the truth I just felt sad that so much time had been wasted through prejudice/ignorance.
Thanks to NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read and review this before publication. It wasn’t quite the hit I’d hoped for.

Great story which kept you on tenterhooks whilst listening to the story from different perspectives. You think you know where this is heading, then something changes and you have a nice shocker waiting!

3.5 stars

Thank you so much to Pan MacMillan and Netgalley for this ARC! Alice Feeney’s last novel Daisy Darker was in my top ten favourite books of last year so I was so excited when I was approved for this!

This is a mystery thriller following four POVs that all connect to a baby being stolen from a buggy in a supermarket twenty years earlier. Edith has been tricked into a nursing home by her daughter and becomes friends with Patience who works at the care home. Neither of them knows that they are both lying to each other, especially Patience who has lied about every single thing she’s told Edith. Clio, Edith’s daughter, has a fraught relationship with her mother and lives alone in her pink house with a life that others envy, or that’s how it looks anyway but the facade she puts on is just that, a facade. Frankie’s daughter ran away over a year ago and she is about to knock on the door of the pink house and tell the biggest secret she’s ever kept to right wrongs. How do these women connect to the kidnapping twenty years prior and how did it set in motion a crime that has taken place today?

I find Alice Feeney’s books to be compulsively readable. I fly through them because the chapters are short and the plots compelling. This was no different and there were so many cliffhangers I just wanted to keep reading. I didn’t see one of the big twists coming and overall it was an enjoyable reading experience.

The reason this wasn’t a four star for me though is because I guessed most of the major twists pretty early on. I thought it was pretty obvious how these women connected and at times I thought I’d got it wrong but I hadn’t. I also (and this is the ONLY problem I had with Daisy Darker as well) is the random “3am thoughts” (you know, the Facebook page) quotes that came out of people’s mouths or that would be randomly inserted in a scene. It really took me out of the story, especially because a lot of them were so cliché and just not needed.

Apart from that I would still recommend this because it’s a good thriller that keeps you guessing at multiple points. I would also recommend this to anyone wanting to dip their toe into the thriller genre as this isn’t very dark and isn’t gory at all and as I said before is really easy to read. I’m excited to see what else Alice Feeney writes and to dive more into her backlist! This one was released on 3rd August so you can grab it now!

This book is such an intricate woven story that had me turning the pages so quickly and I was on tenterhooks throughout! The story is told from so many people and points of view that it was difficult to see how things would all come together. This made the read so exciting and compelling.

A bit of a disappointing middle of the road sort of book for me. Rather too many characters who seemed difficult to put a face to so I spent quite a while remembering who was who. Lots of surprises but not very exciting. So just a three stars from me.

Sometimes bad things happen to good people, so good people have to do bad things. That’s the central tenet in this story about 4 women navigating their way through the consequences of their own and others choices.

The story is told from each of their perspectives and we know that they’re somehow linked from the outset. This is a compelling, slow burn mystery which has some comedic moments as well as the seriousness surrounding a stolen baby and a murder. The characters are brilliantly written; you get a first impression but as the story progresses you find yourself reassessing how accurate that impression was. Each of the women is a blend of good and bad. The Policewoman is also a great character. The only character with no redeeming qualities is art dealer Jude.

I very much enjoyed this story which gradually brought in details and the pictures shifted subtlety until the pieces begin to fall into place towards the end. The plot was cleverly constructed and came to a satisfying conclusion. It’s as much a murder mystery as it is a study of the mother-daughter relationships and the grey areas of good and bad.

"Sometimes bad things happen to good people, so good people have to do bad things."

This story begins at THE END.
And it ends at THE BEGINNING.

Two Mother's Days, twenty years apart, collide as this complex tale unravels from the end to the beginning. And four very different women find themselves tangled in Alice Feeney' latest intricate web.

Twenty years ago, a baby disappears from a pram in a supermarket and is never seen again despite police's best efforts to track her down. The mother is distraught as her whole world as she knows it inevitably changes. Six months later, they bury an empty coffin in an attempt to gain closure if not answers.

In the present day, we meet Frankie. She likes to think of herself as a good bad girl. Life has taught her that people can't be trusted and the only thing you can count on is numbers. So that's what she does. She counts. Three times to open the door. Seventy five steps to the next gate. Twenty five to her car. Numbers calm her. But what she really loves is books. To lose herself in a world of fiction. And as a prison librarian Frankie's job is to ensure that everyone has access to books. She built this library to what it is today. She taught some of the inmates to read. She gave them an appreciation of books. Because in books you can lose yourself and they can be a saviour to your hurting heart just by burying yourself within their pages. And every day she leaves the prison and returns home to her narrowboat and wishes for her missing daughter to return home to her.

Edith's daughter Clio is a therapist who is need of therapy herself. She lives in a pink house with a very expensive collection that remains private to all but her. She tries to help others but fails to help herself. And when it comes to her mother, she has little care to spare. After tricking her mother into signing papers which gave her power of attorney and removed her from her home, she then dumped her into the Windsor Care Home after relieving herself of her mother's beloved dog Dickens.

Plucky Edith Elliot is high spirited and a prisoner in the Windsor Care Home. She has a plan to escape God's waiting room and return to her own home where she was happiest with her dog Dickens who was taken from her and dumped in a shelter, and she longs to take long walks with him again as she used to. But little do the powers that be know, Edith isn't stupid and she has a plan.

On Patience's first day of work at the care home, she found Edith crying in an armchair. It too was Edith's first day at the home and she was distraught over having lost her home and and her dog. When she discovered what had happened to Dickens to spent most of her savings and went to the shelter so she could adopt him. Now she brings him into the care home every so often so that Edith and Dickens are reunited once again.

But now Edith is missing!!

Enter DCI Charlotte Chapman (what a colourful character - in more ways than one...lol). But it seems she is not here to investigate a missing resident, but a murdered employee. And she has THREE suspects to TWO murders with only ONE victim.

The story unfolds through the distinctive narratives of each of the four women - Frankie, Patience, Edith and Clio. But how are all these women linked? And what do they have to do with the murders? Frankie has spent a year searching for her daughter which has brought her to Covent Garden, but will she ever find her?

Every nuance, every fibre, every braid of the story is intricately entwined as we try to untangle each invisible thread. Alice Feeney has a very distinctive and unique style and while this tale is not as dark as some of her previous ones, it is just as twisty and just as clever...given (also) that she wrote it at a very difficult time personally for herself. I normally prefer dialogue driven novels but I an enamoured by Feeney's unique style that she has me turning the pages at the speed of light as I try to untangle the web she has cleverly spun. She examines several issues surrounding motherhood like postpartum depression and the struggles that comes with motherhood. And yet still she thrills as the twists keep coming as slowly the threads begin to unravel to reveal the bigger picture. And while I did figure out pretty much every twist along the way, there was one I DID NOT see coming which left me speechless for a minute, as I went back and re-read what I just read to make sure my eyes weren't playing tricks on me and I really did just read that.

I have only read three novels by Alice Feeney and she never ceases to thrill or chill me. I love her books which, while they are categorised as thrillers, Feeney has successfully shaped her own style of genre. I love how they are each different, exploring nuance and innuendo, whilst being thoroughly entertaining as well. I don't find her a slow burn at all though some readers might so be patient with this one, it really is worth it.

I would like to thank #AliceFeeney, #Netgalley and #PanMacmillan for an ARC of #GoodBadGirl in exchange for an honest review.

This review appears on my blog at https://stinathebookaholic.blogspot.com/.

Alice Feeney is one of my all time favourite thriller authors and so I had really high expectations but honestly I was kind of let down by this one.
There was just something about this book that did not have me hooked at all and I spent most of my time reading it quite bored and wanting to get to the end so I could have answers to all of the questions I had. I think the mystery aspects of this book didn't have me hooked the way other Alice Feeney books have done in the past, and so I finished this book feeling a bit disappointed.
As usual, I still loved Alice Feeney;s writing. It is incredibly fast paced and keeps you in the story as it is so easy to follow and I simply just love her writing.
Overall, Good Bad Girl just was not for me. It is still a pretty good thriller book but it is definitely not a new all time favourite. If you love Alice Feeney I do recommend giving this one a go though.

“She has always thought of herself as a good bad girl. Someone who made the best of the bad life she was born into, and tried to do something good with it.”

The story follows the lives of Patience, Frankie, Edith and Clio. It took me a while to get into the book as I got to grips with each of the four characters. Keep reading and you will find out how they are linked. As with Alice Feeny’s other stories, it feels like Hansel and Gretel following the breadcrumb trail of clues to get you back to the start.

As DCI Chapman keeps stating “…there are three suspects, two murders and, one victim”. A statement I kept puzzling over.

I was keen to read the new Alice Feeny after ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’ took 2022 by storm. I was late to the party with that one and didn’t think it lived up to the hype. I’m keen to see how Good Bad Girl is received.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

An intricately woven story, told in the perspective of the female characters in the book.

I didn't know where the story was going, or how it was going to end. Alice Feeney has written a masterpiece in intrigue and mystery and I loved it.

Fantastic.

Sometimes good people do bad things. Although I knew this would be a great thriller, many parts were cosy mystery, and they came together well, especially with the two retired detectives in the care home. Eighteen years after a baby is stolen from her buggy in a supermarket an elderly woman goes on the run following a murder in a care home. Are these events related? So much coincidence, holding my breath until I found out what happened next, and hoping against hope that the good people really were good. A real tale of consequences. #netgalley #goodbadgirl

This book had me hooked from the beginning.
A baby is stolen from her pushchair in a supermarket. Twenty years later her whereabouts aren’t known.
There is an old woman in a care home. She goes missing the day the carehome manager is found murdered. There are three suspects for the crime but why would they commit such a heinous crime. As the story is told from the differing points of view you quickly establish the connection without it being said.
However, the author still managed to add some additional details to keep the reader on their toes.
Well done Alice Feeney on another excellent book.
Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to see on ARC

Firstly, I can see why Alice Feeney has earned the name ‘queen of twists’, this is a relatively fast paced, intriguing story with plenty of plot twists to keep readers guessing. However unfortunately for me I found there to be rather too many twists and turns and I wasn’t able to suspend my disbelief enough in order to fully enjoy the story.

Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book.

Alice Feeney! OMG always a pleasure to read one of hers!!!!! And as always I was hooked from the beginning!
What a way to start a book with the end! This story is about women, stong women with lots of turbulences going on in the past and present lives!!!!
A totally gripping story with characters so loveable!!!!
Thabk you #NetGalley #Pan Macmillan, Macmillan for this ARC

Having enjoyed Alice Feeney's previous novels I was looking forward to reading this. A great psychological thriller involving different characters' perspectives. A page turner which I couldn't put down and one which I would definitely recommend.