No one in Blackdown tells the whole truth. Read the complete His and Hers summary, character breakdown, and honest review right here.
Alice Feeney's psychological thriller does something few books in the genre manage with real conviction, it makes you trust two narrators simultaneously, then pulls the ground out from under both of them.
I finished it in two days and spent the following week thinking about how confidently I had been misled at nearly every turn.
If you are looking for a thorough breakdown of His and Hers, this is the right place to start.
Synopsis of His and Hers
Anna Andrews, a BBC news anchor, is sent to cover a murder in Blackdown, the village where she grew up. DCI Jack Harper, her ex-husband, leads the investigation.
He recognizes the victim as the woman he was with the night before and hides the connection.
As Anna revisits painful high school memories involving bullying, grooming, and assault, the present-day murders keep mounting.
Each victim belongs to the same childhood circle, and each body is marked with a friendship bracelet.
A third narrator, the killer, runs through the entire book, keeping both characters and readers off balance until the very end.
Themes Discussed in His and Hers
A sharp, unsettling look at truth as a matter of perspective, the long reach of childhood violence, and what people are willing to do to protect themselves and the people they love.
The Subjectivity of Truth
The novel explores the existence of multiple perspectives and the genuine difficulty of locating truth within subjective narratives.
Feeney structures the book around the idea that both narrators are unreliable not necessarily because they are dishonest but because their understanding of events is always filtered through self-interest, trauma, and memory.
The reader receives two accounts of the same reality and must decide, chapter by chapter, how much weight to give each one.
The Violence of the Past
His and Hers is not simply a mystery about who killed whom. The novel keeps circling back to the night of Anna's sixteenth birthday, treating it as the wound from which everything else in the story bleeds.
Feeney refuses to minimize what happened to Anna and to Catherine. The adult plot is directly shaped by what those girls experienced, and the book earns its darkness by treating that history with real seriousness.
Complicity and Silence
Several characters in the novel had opportunities to speak about what they knew or saw and chose not to. That silence costs people their lives.
Feeney does not use this as simple moral instruction. She shows how silence accumulates over years into something that seems impossible to break, even when speaking would have been the right and obvious thing to do.
Character Analysis
Through two unreliable central figures and a killer whose voice runs through the entire book, Feeney builds a novel in which almost no one is simply innocent or simply guilty.
Anna Andrews
Anna is the book's most layered figure. She is a high-functioning alcoholic with genuine memory gaps, which makes her narration feel limited rather than manipulative.
Her slow recovery of what happened to her at sixteen gives the final act its emotional weight.
DCI Jack Harper
Jack's chapters run on steady tension because the reader never fully trusts what he believes about himself. His drinking and insomnia are not just character colour.
They make his account structurally unreliable in a way that feels earned rather than convenient.
Anna's Mother, Mrs. Andrews
She spends most of the novel appearing frail and confused. The reveal that she has been faking dementia the entire time, and is in fact the killer, lands hard precisely because Feeney had so thoroughly positioned her as incapable of harm.
Rachel
Rachel is dead before the story finds its footing, but her past cruelty drives everything. As Anna's memories surface, Rachel becomes harder to read as simply a victim.
Her death sets the plot in motion, but the reader's feelings about it stay complicated throughout.
Writing Style and Narrative Voice
Feeney's prose is built for speed, but it carries more weight than its pace might initially suggest.
Feeney's Structural Precision
The three-narrator structure, alternating between His, Hers, and the Killer, is managed with real discipline. Throughout the novel, the reader continuously suspects both Anna and Jack of being the killer, then suspects someone else, then someone else again.
Feeney managed to surprise even experienced thriller readers when the killer was finally revealed. The chapters are short and end with enough forward pull that the book resists being set down.
Feeney does not use this momentum to paper over character depth. The pacing serves the story rather than substituting for it.
Atmosphere and Setting
The dark puzzle at the heart of the novel sends both main characters back to high school to uncover what happened years ago.
The friendship bracelets and buried secrets in this gripping tale of suspense give the small-town setting a second layer of meaning that accumulates across the book.
Blackdown feels like a place that remembers everything, including what everyone there would prefer to forget.
Critical Reception
His and Hers was originally published in 2020 and drew on Feeney's years of experience as a BBC journalist and producer.
It became one of the most talked-about psychological thrillers of that year.
Reviewers praised it as a twisty, smart novel with expertly drawn narrators that keeps readers guessing until the very end.
One reviewer described it as giving Gone Girl a run for its money. Another called it filmic and gripping with dark secrets dragged into the light.
Notable Reviews and Ratings
- Goodreads: 4.09 out of 5 stars across tens of thousands of ratings.
- Amazon: 4.3 out of 5 stars across thousands of reviews.
His and Hers has also been adapted for Netflix as a streaming series starring Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal.
The Movie Adaptation
His and Hers was adapted into a Netflix streaming series, with the show arriving in 2026. The adaptation stars Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal in the central roles of Anna and Jack.
The production preserves the novel's dual-perspective structure and its atmosphere of mutual suspicion between two people who share history they would both prefer to leave buried.
Thompson brings considerable intensity to Anna's fractured reliability, while the show retains the small-town English setting that gives the source material much of its pressure.
Feeney's core strengths, the layered deception and the slow drip of revelation, translate well to the screen format.
Personal Reading Experience
His and Hers was not what I anticipated. A standard two-narrator thriller usually telegraphs guilt early, but this one kept revising my suspicions through small, well-timed revelations.
The third narrator, the killer's voice, pushed the book from clever into genuinely unsettling territory. Having two unreliable protagonists is one thing.
Letting the reader sit inside the mind of an active killer and still be surprised by the reveal is something else entirely.
Anna is the character who stayed with me longest. Feeney writes her damage without softening it or bending it toward easy narrative purposes.
The final act is difficult, and the reveal earns its emotional weight.
About the Author Alice Feeney
Alice Feeney is a writer and journalist who spent fifteen years at BBC News, working across roles including reporter, news editor, and arts producer.
She has lived in London and Sydney before settling in the Surrey countryside. That broadcast background gives her fiction a sharp awareness of how stories get shaped, who controls the narrative, and what conveniently gets left out.
These instincts run through every page of His and Hers. The novel is widely considered her strongest work to date, and the Netflix adaptation starring Tessa Thompson confirms that her storytelling has found an audience well beyond the literary thriller section.
Conclusion
This breakdown of the His and Hers characters and themes covers what makes the novel worth your time.
Feeney has constructed a story that works as both a fast, compulsive thriller and a serious examination of how the past shapes the present in ways that are often violent and almost never clean.
The characters are the reason it holds together. Almost everyone has a coherent, painful reason for being exactly who they are, and that coherence makes every revelation land hard.
If you want fiction that takes both its story and its people seriously, this one delivers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is His and Hers part of a series?
No. It is a standalone psychological thriller. Alice Feeney has written other novels, but this book does not connect to them narratively.
How long does it take to read His and Hers?
The novel is approximately 320 pages. Most readers finish it in six to eight hours, often in two sittings given how it is structured.
What age is appropriate for reading His and Hers?
The book suits adult readers. It contains graphic violence, sexual assault, childhood grooming, and mature psychological content throughout.
Is there a film or television adaptation of His and Hers?
Yes. His and Hers has been adapted as a Netflix series starring Tessa Thompson.
Who is the main character in His and Hers?
Anna Andrews and DCI Jack Harper share the central narrative. The story alternates between their perspectives alongside a third voice belonging to the killer, whose identity is concealed until the final act.
