ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – It Could Have Been Her by Lisa Jewell

Posted on 10th July 2026 By Nicola

It Could Have Been Her by Lisa Jewell is published by Century and is available now. My thanks to the publishers for the proof copy.

It was the night she almost died.

Jane Trevally, newly divorced and feeling a little lost, agrees to accompany a man she doesn’t know to his house in the darkest corner of Hampstead Heath. She’s offered a drink, goes in, and then – a scream and the sound of something falling upstairs – Jane senses she’s in a bad place. She runs.

Twenty five years later, Jane finds herself outside the same house, this time to return a small white dog who’s been found near her home in the country; a dog whose owner has just been reported missing.

A fleeting glimpse of a haunted looking woman through the window sends Jane on a mission to uncover the house’s secrets – secrets more terrifying than she could have ever imagined, especially when she realises it could have been her. . .

I think you can’t go wrong with a Lisa Jewell novel. It Could Have Been Her is her twenty-fourth book and it had me gripped.

Jane Trevally lives alone in her crumbling Georgian family home, unsure if she can manage to hang onto it. A dog running loose on her land proves a welcome distraction, even more so when she discovers where the dog came from, a house that over two decades ago she unwisely went back to with a man, fleeing when she got a sense that there was something sinister going on there. When the dog is linked to a missing girl Jane turns amateur private detective and what a brilliant one she turned out to be.

Jane’s current day investigations are intertwined with memories of people from the house and it makes for a really twisted and dark tale. I will say that I didn’t concentrate quite as hard as I should have in the first half or so and I regretted it because I had to turn back quite a few times to remind myself of earlier events, but by the second half I couldn’t wait to pick it up and didn’t want to put it down, feeling rather sad when I finished it.

There is such an interesting plot. On the one hand you have a (very) dysfunctional family and what happened at their house unfolds slowly (although it’s clear from the off that some bad things have happened there) and then you have Jane, whose own life is just as much a part of the story as those she is investigating. I think it’s the characters that truly make this book: Jane, of course, but also her stepson Dexter and the dog that started it all, Hugo. As a whole it’s fascinating and compelling and I enjoyed it so much.

Lisa Jewell’s first novel, Ralph’s Party, was published in 1999 and was the best-selling debut novel of the year. Since then she has published another twenty-three novels, most lately a number of dark psychological thrillers, including Then She Was Gone, The Family Upstairs and None of This is True. Lisa is a number one New York Times and Sunday Times author who has sold over ten million books worldwide and been published in more than thirty languages. She lives in north London with her husband, two daughters, Daisy, a Romanian rescue dog, and a mad orange cat called Ivy.

@lisajewelluk on Twitter @lisajewelluk on Instagram @lisajewellofficial on Facebook.