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Rock Paper Scissors by Alice Feeney

Thriller

Rock Paper Scissors

by Alice Feeney

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Quick take

When a remote anniversary getaway turns eerie, a couple learns if their marriage can bear the weight of their secrets.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Fast_Read

    Fast read

  • Illustrated icon, Unreliable_Narrator

    Unreliable narrator

  • Illustrated icon, Marriage_Issues

    Marriage issues

  • Illustrated icon, Writers_Life

    Writer's life

Synopsis

Think you know the person you married? Think again…

Things have been wrong with Mr and Mrs Wright for a long time. When Adam and Amelia win a weekend away to Scotland, it might be just what their marriage needs. Self-confessed workaholic and screenwriter Adam Wright has lived with face blindness his whole life. He can’t recognize friends or family, or even his own wife.

Every anniversary the couple exchange traditional gifts—paper, cotton, pottery, tin—and each year Adam’s wife writes him a letter that she never lets him read. Until now. They both know this weekend will make or break their marriage, but they didn’t randomly win this trip. One of them is lying, and someone doesn’t want them to live happily ever after.

Free sample

Get an early look from the first pages of Rock Paper Scissors.

Rock Paper Scissors

My husband doesn’t recognize my face.

I feel him staring at me as I drive, and wonder what he sees. Nobody else looks familiar to him either, but it is still strange to think that the man I married wouldn’t be able to pick me out in a police lineup.

I know the expression his face is wearing without having to look. It’s the sulky, petulant, “I told you so” version, so I concentrate on the road instead. I need to. The snow is falling faster now, it’s like driving in a whiteout, and the windscreen wipers on my Morris Minor Traveller are struggling to cope. The car—like me—was made in 1978. If you look after things, they will last a lifetime, but I suspect my husband might like to trade us both in for a younger model. Adam has checked his seat belt a hundred times since we left home, and his hands are balled into conjoined fists on his lap. The journey from London up to Scotland should have taken no more than eight hours, but I daren’t drive any faster in this storm. Even though it’s starting to get dark, and it seems we might be lost in more ways than one.

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Why I love it

Suspense is always my go-to genre—I love the fast-pace, the puzzle-solving aspect, the mysteries hidden inside the story, and also the mysteries hidden inside other people. And wow does Rock Paper Scissors take all of these elements to a whole new level. This is an absolutely propulsive read, brimming with atmosphere and full of surprises.

This is the story of Adam and Amelia Wright, a married couple on the brink. Adam, a successful screenwriter, lives with face blindness and cannot recognize those around him. When Amelia wins a weekend getaway to the Scottish Highlands, what begins as a potential romantic weekend to save their marriage instead kicks off an eerie, unsettling sequence of events. Told in multiple points of view, each narrator has a different plan for the weekend, and neither fully trusts the other. The location only increases the suspense: a rumored-to-be haunted, converted chapel in the middle of nowhere, isolated and cut off by an incoming snowstorm. Even reading in the heat of summer, you can feel the cold seeping in, along with a steadily growing dread, as you come to realize the Wrights are not alone....

Rock Paper Scissors is a tense, chilling thriller told both over the course of one unsettling weekend, and also through ten years of anniversary letters interspersed throughout the chapters. With a gothic, atmospheric setting, dueling points of view, and gasp-worthy surprises, this is the type of one-sitting read that will have readers turning pages deep into the night.

Member ratings (49,513)

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View all
The Boyfriend
The Last One at the Wedding
Sleep Tight
First Lie Wins
House of Glass
Middle of the Night
Listen for the Lie
A Talent for Murder
Someone in the Attic
One Perfect Couple
Like Mother, Like Daughter
Darling Girls
Kill for Me, Kill for You
Bad Tourists
Murder Road
Daughter of Mine
The Fury
Only if You’re Lucky
The Other Mothers
When I’m Dead
The Soulmate
What Lies in the Woods
She Started It
The Only One Left
Dark Corners
Blacktop Wasteland
All the Dangerous Things
The Only Survivors
The Broken Girls
The Family Game
The Push
We Were Never Here
Things We Do in the Dark
The Golden Couple
The Collective
The Stranger Upstairs
Gone Tonight
Too Good to Be True
The Last Word
You Are Not Alone
Rock Paper Scissors
Not a Happy Family
A Flicker in the Dark
The Last Flight
Reckless Girls
The House Across the Lake
The Wife Upstairs
The Last Thing He Told Me
The Maidens
Everything We Didn't Say
Invisible Girl
The Paris Apartment
You're Invited
The Last Party
Dark Places
Pieces of Her
The Wife Between Us
Sharp Objects
None of This Is True
The Silent Patient
The Winter Sister
The Other Woman
Necessary People
The Family Upstairs
The Night Swim
Girl A
The Hunting Wives
Just Another Missing Person
First Born
The Lies I Tell
Breathless