I will read anything Lisa Jewell writes, which is exactly why I can say this one sits in her middle tier without feeling disloyal. It’s a perfectly good book that keeps promising to become a gripping one.

The setup is classic Jewell domestic menace. Jane Trevally, fifty-five, twice-divorced, rattling around a crumbling Dorset pile with four dogs and a true-crime podcast permanently in her ears, follows a lost Westie back to a house on the edge of Hampstead Heath that she once fled on a frightening night decades ago. From there the story splits across timelines and narrators, including a genuinely unsettling watcher whose sections carry most of the book’s static charge.

What works is the momentum. The chapters are tiny, seventy-odd of them, and Jewell uses that ticking, one-more-before-bed rhythm to keep you turning pages even when not a great deal is actually happening. Her characters stay her real gift. Jane especially is wonderfully flawed and self-aware, the kind of woman who narrates her own bad decisions while making them. The Vale of Health setting, a hidden hamlet that feels sealed off from the rest of London, does a lot of quiet atmospheric work.

The trouble is that the plot flatlines. The machinery is elaborate and the pace is real, but the mystery never tightens into genuine tension, and the payoff lands softer than all that build-up earns. This is a 400-plus page book with a lean 250-page thriller inside it, and I kept wishing an editor had gone looking for it. Nothing here bored me. Nothing quite gripped me either.

So: not her best, not a misfire. A capable, readable, slightly overlong book from a writer whose floor is still higher than most people’s ceiling.

I just finished the best debut fiction EVER. The other casualty? My heart, completely shattered.

Three perspectives. One family. So many themes packed into one book that it should feel like too much, and somehow never does: grief, addiction, abandonment, teen motherhood, resentment, second-chance love, forgiveness. This is the story of the Bright family, and it is epic, raw, and devastating in the best way.

Ryan and Lily meet in a library, and it plays out like the perfect meet-cute, two flawed people falling for each other while quietly hiding the things that will define their future. Ryan is running from his father's legacy even as he becomes him. Lily is carrying a secret from her own teenage years that she never stopped grieving. Their daughter, Jet, grows up mostly raised by her grandmother, carrying resentment she doesn't fully understand until she meets the brother she never knew she had.

What makes this book so effective is the structure. Moving between Ryan, Lily, and Jet isn't just a device, it's the whole point. You get the same events refracted through three different sets of pain and blind spots, and you end up understanding all of them even when you want to shake them. Damoff never lets one character become the villain. Everyone is doing damage and trying to undo it at the same time, often in the same breath.

The writing itself is quiet and precise. Damoff doesn't reach for melodrama even when the material is devastating, she just lays the moments down plainly and lets them do the work. There's a real understanding here of how addiction doesn't announce itself as a single dramatic collapse but as a slow accumulation of small betrayals. Same with grief, same with resentment. Nothing in this book feels rushed or performed. It feels lived in.

And underneath all of it is a patient, unflashy argument about family: that it isn't built once and finished, it's rebuilt constantly, in small acts of showing up, and sometimes in the choice to build a new one entirely out of the people who stayed.

I don't think I can put into words how hard this book hit me. I saw myself in all three of them, their mistakes, their longing, their small moments of grace. Every chapter, every character, every ache. This one is staying with me for a long time.