Oyinda Loves Books

Title: Invisible Girl

Author: Lisa Jewell

Narrators: Donna Banya, Katherine Kelly, Connor Swindells

Rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

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Lisa Jewell has done it again! She’s one of my favorite thriller authors, and this is my third (or fourth?) Lisa Jewell book. I love how she takes the domestic thriller sub genre and just changes it up. This book had such strange characters, and it seemed at some point that anybody could have done it. I also love how she focuses on older women in the books I’ve read. Lots of thrillers focus on 20-something women, but LJ has a way of bringing older 40/50 something women to the forefront of her books.

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In this book, Cate, Saffyre, and Owen were the main characters. There was a lot of character development in this book, but that wasn’t enough to make Owen redeemable to me and that’s why this book isn’t a 5-star for me. There were some parts that were very disturbing. I was so so scared for Saffyre and in the heat of things I just kept hoping she was okay. In a book where many of the characters turned out to be multi-dimensional, Georgia was so sadly flat. She was so oblivious to everything happening around her and in her family, I really didn’t like her character as well.

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This book sucks you in, and is really twisty. The suspicion of characters moves like the hands of a clock, so there’s always a new character to suspect often, and even after you think a character couldn’t have done it, they could still come under suspicion. Lies, betrayals, secrets, and many other elements make this very intriguing. This is also a police procedural, and there was a very heavy presence of the police, and many scenes took place at the police station.

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A heavy theme in this book is sexual assault and harassment, and the perspective of incels, so that deserves mention for trigger warnings, because it left me very unsettled. Bryn’s entire character made me want to puke and I’m grateful for how the author tied that up.

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If you love a good thriller, you’ll have a fun time with this one.

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Blurb

The author of the “rich, dark, and intricately twisted” (Ruth Ware, New York Times bestselling author) The Family Upstairs returns with another taut and white-knuckled thriller following a group of people whose lives shockingly intersect when a young woman disappears.

Owen Pick’s life is falling apart.

In his thirties, a virgin, and living in his aunt’s spare bedroom, he has just been suspended from his job as a geography teacher after accusations of sexual misconduct, which he strongly denies. Searching for professional advice online, he is inadvertently sucked into the dark world of incel—involuntary celibate—forums, where he meets the charismatic, mysterious, and sinister Bryn.

Across the street from Owen lives the Fours family, headed by mom Cate, a physiotherapist, and dad Roan, a child psychologist. But the Fours family have a bad feeling about their neighbor Owen. He’s a bit creepy and their teenaged daughter swears he followed her home from the train station one night.

Meanwhile, young Saffyre Maddox spent three years as a patient of Roan Fours. Feeling abandoned when their therapy ends, she searches for other ways to maintain her connection with him, following him in the shadows and learning more than she wanted to know about Roan and his family. Then, on Valentine’s night, Saffyre Maddox disappears—and the last person to see her alive is Owen Pick.

With evocative, vivid, and unputdownable prose and plenty of disturbing twists and turns, Jewell’s latest thriller is another “haunting, atmospheric, stay-up-way-too-late read” (Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling author).

The Author

Lisa was born in London in 1968. Her mother was a secretary and her father was a textile agent and she was brought up in the northernmost reaches of London with her two younger sisters. She was educated at a Catholic girls’ Grammar school in Finchley. After leaving school at sixteen she spent two years at Barnet College doing an arts foundation course and then two years at Epsom School of Art & Design studying Fashion Illustration and Communication.

She worked for the fashion chain Warehouse for three years as a PR assistant and then for Thomas Pink, the Jermyn Street shirt company for four years as a receptionist and PA. She started her first novel, Ralph’s Party, for a bet in 1996. She finished it in 1997 and it was published by Penguin books in May 1998. It went on to become the best-selling debut novel of that year.

She has since written a further nine novels, as is currently at work on her eleventh.

She now lives in an innermost part of north London with her husband Jascha, an IT consultant, her daughters, Amelie and Evie and her silver tabbies, Jack and Milly.