A Very Good Bad Idea, by Emma Chase | Free Audiobook
9 August 2026
A lost dog, a missing girl, and a house that remembers
Jane Trevally is walking her dogs across her crumbling Dorset estate when a small white terrier appears out of the bluebell woods, alone, hungry, and wearing no collar. The dog belongs to a man in London, but the teenage girl he had been staying with has just been reported missing. With no other way to help, Jane offers to return the terrier to his registered owner herself.
The address takes her to Thornwood, a run-down house buried in the backwaters of Hampstead, and the moment she sees it, the past slams back into her. Jane has been here before, twenty-five years ago, and the memories are not kind. The man who answers the door is not the man she remembers, he is cagey, evasive, and claims to know nothing about the missing girl. Through the window, Jane catches a glimpse of a haunted-looking woman who never comes to the door.
Jane knows this house holds the key to the missing teenager, to her own buried trauma, and to dark secrets that were never meant to surface. But digging into the past means trusting no one, including her own memories. Some doors should stay closed. Some houses should stay forgotten. And some questions, once asked, cannot be unasked.
Lisa Jewell has a gift for making ordinary people terrifying, and It Could Have Been Her is proof that she has not lost it. The setup is deceptively simple, a woman finds a lost dog, returns him to his owner, and steps into a house that drags her back to a trauma she spent twenty-five years burying. From there, the story unfolds in layers, following the Black family across decades of cruelty, addiction, and secrets, and I was completely absorbed by the time the pieces started clicking.
What works best here is the atmosphere. Thornwood is a genuinely unsettling presence, a house where every wall seems to hold a memory and every resident seems to be lying about something. Jane is a compelling anchor, a woman in her fifties carrying the weight of her past, and the way Jewell slowly reveals what happened to her twenty-five years ago kept me turning the chapters. Fans of Don't Let Him In will recognize her, and this book deepens her story in satisfying ways.
I will warn you: this is a slow burn. The first quarter moves at a deliberate pace while the author sets up the sprawling cast, and the full picture only emerges around the halfway mark. Some readers will find that patience-testing, and I almost did. But once the threads start pulling together, the menace compounds scene after scene, and the ending, appropriately for Jewell, leaves you with more questions than answers. It is a thriller with questions, not a thriller with neat resolutions, and I respect that choice even as it frustrated me slightly.
The audiobook is exceptionally well cast. Lesley Sharp brings Jane's guarded weariness to life with quiet precision, and James Norton's performance adds a layer of charm and menace to the male characters that fits the tone perfectly. This is one of those listens where the narration elevates the material. If you like your psychological thrillers dark, sprawling, and morally messy, It Could Have Been Her delivers. Just do not expect everyone to get what they deserve, because that is not how Jewell's world works.
Dive into It Could Have Been Her by Lisa Jewell, the instant New York Times bestseller where a lost dog leads a woman back to a house full of secrets she buried twenty-five years ago.
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