Rock Paper Scissors

Nothing in this novel is what it seems. Are there ghosts? Maybe. Are there murderers? Maybe. Is everyone lying? Maybe. A husband and wife in a snowstorm in Scotland in a place called Blackwater. What could go wrong? I’m sure you know the answer to that. I also loved the semi-epistolary insertions. Alice Feeney delivers a chilling story.

Genuinely confused about the hype

Loved this book. So many twists and turns. And definitely didn’t predict the ending

This thriller starts off pretty happy and chipper with harmless omitted secrets between a husband and wife. A wrench is thrown into disrupt things and everything from that moment on is a whirlwind of creepy moments, memories and well constructed plans. This author does a great job with putting a plot together so sound you keep guessing and are still being surprised right up until the end of the story.

I grabbed Rock Paper Scissors on audio for a book club. I listened at 2.0x to 2.20x because at 2.5x the voices got muddy. Richard Armitage and Stephanie Racine were fine to have in my ears, but not memorable. Stephanie often sounded stuck on one note of shock and awe. Richard mostly read as suspicious and a little bored. I did like having both a male and a female narrator to keep the POVs straight. Even so, I zoned out a lot and found myself bored more than once. This book has a great setup. A marriage is in trouble. A wintry trip to the middle of nowhere in Scotland. Secret anniversary letters. A husband with face blindness. The ingredients are there. What did not work for me was the follow-through. I did not like anyone in this story. That can be the point in a domestic thriller, but if I do not care about anyone, I need the craft or the twists to win me back. They did not. Here is where the twisty stuff lost me. Spoilers ahead. Robin, being Adam’s first wife and also Henry Winter’s daughter, could have been juicy, especially with Adam’s career tied to Henry’s horror novel and the screenplay. Instead, it felt like a soap reveal that shows up, causes drama, then fizzles. The long game to lure Adam and Amelia to Scotland is clever in theory. On the page, it reads like a checklist of gotchas. The stalking, the letters, the church, the offer of Henry Winter’s last book as Adam’s “big break” if he leaves Amelia. It aims for devious. It landed as contrived. Face blindness is ripe for tension, and a character with prosopagnosia can absolutely recognize people by their voices, gaits, clothes, and context. Here, it is used more like 'people-blindness,' which stretches believability. It also becomes a convenient tool to justify every mistaken identity and every poor decision. The trauma threads around Adam’s mother and the red kimono image had potential. I liked the way that visual kept resurfacing. I did not like how the book tosses culpability around to prop up shocks rather than to deepen character. The rock-paper-scissors ritual as a way to end arguments was one of the only charming touches. I actually liked that detail. My biggest problem is that the reveals did not feel earned. I rarely guess twists, and I still found these boring. The book wants to be a pressure cooker of lies and long-con revenge. What I felt was a lot of posturing without the emotional punch to back it up. I ended up feeling bad for Adam by default because Amelia and Robin are both working an angle. Yet, Adam is self-absorbed enough to miss every cue that these are trained performers who are using his boyhood wounds against him. In the prose, some lines try to sound profound. A few are pretty on their own. In bulk, they started reading like fortune cookie wisdom. Every time I felt momentum building, another glossy one-liner pulled me out of the scene. That did not help my engagement on audio, where pace matters. This might scratch your domestic thriller itch if you love icy settings, locked-in vibes, and do not mind spending time with awful people. For me, it was a long trudge through the snow for a payoff that did not deliver.