His & Hers

Alice Feeney is known for her twisty psychological thrillers such as Daisy Darker and Sometimes I Lie. His & Hers rests comfortably within this genre of fiction. However, the text also plays with a setting evocative of a cozy mystery, and Jack’s position as the lead detective on the case is the defining trope of a procedural mystery. Feeney uses aspects from neighboring genres to heighten the central problems experienced in psychological thrillers: deciding whom to trust and what is real.

Psychological thrillers tend to feature common tones and tropes. They often depict antagonists with atypical psychologies, such as antisocial or paranoid personality disorders. Protagonists contend with deceit, gaslighting, and suspicion as they try to solve—and survive—the mystery. They further delve into the protagonists’ psyches and the mental or emotional states that shape their perspectives. Anna’s and Jack’s investigations are compromised by their determination to conceal certain pieces of evidence, avoid certain discoveries, and bury certain memories. The modern psychological thriller owes a debt to both Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock. Both explored the ways that individual psychologies mediate external events and exploit imperfect information as a source of dread.

Feeney sets His & Hers within a charming English village that evokes the expected tropes of a cozy mystery, using the dissonance to heighten the psychological mystery’s tension. Blackdown “wears its Sunday best every day of the week. Pretty, well-looked-after Victorian cottages stand proud behind neat gardens, moss-covered dry-stone walls, and the occasional white picket fence” (34). The setting is picturesque and tranquil. Neighbors engage in friendly competition over their window boxes, and the streets are clean. The events of the novel are unexpected, and the police are inexperienced with such crimes. Just as the text explores what lurks beneath the characters’ appearances, it investigates Blackdown’s secrets.

While the protagonists in cozy mysteries are often amateur detectives and women, labels that apply to Anna, Jack belongs to a different mystery subgenre: detective fiction or procedural mystery. This genre centers on law enforcement professionals working to solve a crime, usually a murder. Unlike amateurs, they have access to contemporary forensic methods such as DNA testing and phone tracing.

His & Hers is a psychological thriller that toys with key conventions of the cozy mystery and detective fiction, reframing them within the psychological thriller’s menacing atmosphere and attention to individual perspectives and disordered psyches. The invocation of neighboring genres broadens the narrative scope and challenges the readers’ expectations.