Beautiful Ugly is a twist-heavy thriller built around an unlikeable, unreliable narrator, executed with confidence and pace. It’s absorbing and often clever, but its pleasures depend on how willing you are to accept a healthy dose of melodrama.
Plot in a nutshell
Grady Green, a successful author, watches his life collapse after his wife disappears. His agent offers him a lifeline: the keys to a remote writing cabin on a sparsely populated Scottish island, a place of isolation where he might recover and work. Once there, oddness builds, and builds quickly. The island feels watched, the people feel staged, and Grady’s own account of events begins to fray, raising questions not just about what is happening, but about who he really is and how much of his story can be trusted.
Thoughts
This is, first and foremost, a novel interested in the mechanics of unreliability. Grady is not written to be likeable. He is selfish, self-absorbed, and curiously insulated even in grief. I found it difficult to feel much sympathy for him, which seems deliberate. I did enjoy how the book gradually reframes his unreliability: not merely as a trick to wrong-foot the reader, but as something that makes sense but leaves the reader questioning what truth might mean here. The unveiling of how and why his perspective can’t be trusted is smartly handled, and it gives the novel its strongest moments.
Where the book is less persuasive is in its supporting cast. There is a persistent sense that the other characters are not fully inhabited so much as performing roles. They feel like actors hitting their marks rather than people whose inner lives extend beyond the page. Sandy comes closest to breaking out of this flatness, but even she becomes frustrating over time, her terseness edging from intriguing into distant oddness.
The twists come thick and fast, each designed to keep the reader slightly off-balance. Feeney is good at the rhythm of revelation, and the book is hard to put down for exactly that reason. The cost is credibility. As the plot accelerates, it increasingly asks the reader to drop their sense of incredulity. Certain actions and coincidences are chronically difficult to explain in human terms, and if you pause to interrogate them too closely, the spell weakens.
Still, this is a thriller, and thrillers live or die by momentum. On that front, Beautiful Ugly delivers. It is a fun, well-written ride, even when it strains belief. Importantly, it never feels sloppy. The writing is controlled, and everything that is written matters even if the reveals come thick and fast they are well set up. One area where the novel genuinely excels is its use of setting. Grady’s awe at the landscape feels earned rather than ornamental. The island, its beauty, its remoteness, its quiet menace, is rendered with photo realism. This part of Scotland is supremely beautiful, and the writing captures both its grandeur and its isolating effect. The environment does more than provide atmosphere; it amplifies Grady’s inward turn and reinforces the sense of being cut off from ordinary moral and social checks.
Beautiful Ugly knows exactly what it’s doing and does it efficiently. Whether you find it satisfying will depend less on its craft than on your tolerance for a thriller that values surprise over belief, and motion over depth.