Rock Paper Scissors

Alice Feeney’s Rock Paper Scissors from 2021 plays like Gone Girl rewritten as a windswept gothic paperback from 1967 — all brooding landscapes, isolated manors, and the slow unraveling of a marriage built on deceit. This is a modern domestic thriller that remembers its roots in the paperback rack: one foot in the psychological suspense of Agatha Christie and the other in the twist-driven storytelling of Gillian Flynn.

The premise is familiar — a troubled London couple retreat to a remote chapel turned vacation rental in the Scottish Highlands to save their marriage. Feeney uses the setup as a springboard for a tightly wound study of secrets and shifting perspectives. The Scottish Highlands stand in for the moors of classic gothic fiction, and the creaking, snowbound chapel-turned-house could easily have graced the cover of a 1960s Dell gothic, complete with a terrified woman fleeing in her nightgown.

Feeney writes with the precision of a screenwriter (which she is), and she structures the novel like a trapdoor. Each chapter rearranges your understanding of what came before, and by the time the final twisty reveal lands, it’s both shocking and inevitable. The unfolding truths recall the best Christie puzzles and contemporary thrillers.

Readers nostalgic for the paperback days of Victoria Holt and Phyllis A. Whitney will appreciate how Rock Paper Scissors updates that tradition for the streaming era: moody, propulsive, and dripping with dread. Feeney’s prose is lean, her pacing brutal, and her sense of place immaculate. It’s the rare “domestic suspense” novel that earns its hype and reminds us that the gothic isn’t dead.

Rock Paper Scissors is a masterclass in misdirection and the kind of modern gothic thriller that would have had Agatha Christie smiling in admiration and Dell editors clamoring for a reprint.

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