I am definitely an Alice Feeney fan, however, Good Bad Girl was a difficult one for me to get through. It took multiple readings for me to parse what had happened to whom, which took away from my enjoyment.

What a wild ride! The author keeps you guessing the entire book and intertwines the stories so well that you feel like your lost and end up on the other side with quite a story to tell.
There are moments of heartbreak and triumph through this story but it well mimics the different parts of humans and their mental health and difficult family relationships.

Fabulous! At my school, my students flock towards this author. They mostly read print books, but we have recently launched an audiobook option and I will press this title. A superior way to read this series!

I really enjoyed the audiobook version of Good Bad Girl. This was an excellent suspense/ thriller, and the narration was fabulous. I have come to really love author Alice Feeney and narrator Stephanie Racine. I always enjoy their work in combination. Good Bad Girl was a slow burn that kept my attention and kept me guessing until the very end. I would recommend it to any lover of mystery, thriller, and suspense books.

"Good Bad Girl" by Alice Feeney promises a gripping mystery woven with drama and unexpected twists. Two decades after a baby vanishes from a stroller, a murder at a care home reignites the cold case, suggesting a hidden link between the two crimes. Eighty-year-old Edith, determined to escape her nursing home, forms an unlikely alliance with Patience, a caregiver concealing her secrets. Meanwhile, Edith's daughter Clio grapples with her troubled past as ominous figures approach her door. As these women navigate distrust and deception, they become entangled in a web of mysteries involving three suspects, two murders, and one victim. Feeney's novel is poised to unravel the truth behind the missing baby, the grieving mother, and the intricate connections binding them all together.

Good Bad Girl by Alice Feeney is an intense roller coaster ride of a mystery. With twists and turns and more than a few red herrings laying about.

Summary -

"...I stare at the empty stroller, wondering if I left the baby at home. I was so tired yesterday I put my phone in the fridge by accident. Maybe I forgot to put the baby in the buggy before I left the house today? But then I remember the elderly woman on the street, she saw the baby. The friend who is now a stranger saw the baby too. I saw the baby, five minutes ago. Maybe ten. When did I last see her? The panic rises and I spin around, looking up and down the supermarket aisle. She's gone. The baby is too young to crawl. She didn't climb out by herself.
Someone has taken her..."

Twenty years before a baby is stolen from a stroller, now a woman lays murdered in a care home. Somehow the two events are connected. But what is the truth that links the two events?

Edith was tricked by her children into living in the nursing home. Now her own daughter Clio refuses to speak with her. Her son she never sees. But there is someone who cares for Edith. Someone who will help her. Everyone thinks because she is old that her mind is frail but the opposite is the truth. Edith is planning her escape and the young girl Patience is all the help she needs. But what Edith does not know is that Patience has so many secrets of her own.

"...I am working but I don't work here,' says he young woman, speaking in riddles and tucking the silly strand of pink hair behind her heavily pierced ears. She studies Clio in a way that Clio normally studies others and it is unnerving. Clio waits for her to say more but she doesn't. Sometimes the gaps between a person's words are more interesting than the words themselves.
'Sorry, I don't understand,' Clio says eventually.
'I'm a detective,' the woman replies, as though that should be a sufficient explanation.
Clio flushes with embarrassment and something else but soon recovers. 'Then you do know about my mother. She's the one who has gone missing. I presume that's why you're here?'
The detective shakes her head. 'I'm not here about a missing person. I'm here about a murder..."

Frankie did a bad thing twenty years ago but it was for all the good reasons. Now things have changed and she is not sure is what she did will ever be made right. Her own secrets have left her estranged from her daughter, but now the past is intruding on the future.

"...The food she orders arrives quickly, but her phone beeps inside her bag before she can take a bite, which means she doesn't see the police car drive past the window. Her phone hasn't made a sound for almost a year-unless it was an alarm she set herself-and the unexpected noise makes her jump. She checks the time on her Mickey Mouse watch, and presumes it must be work getting in touch to see why she hasn't turned up today. But it isn't someone from the prison. It's her daughter. Almost exactly a year since she ran away.
The text message is short, just three words.
HELP ME MUM..."

The past converging on the here and now, Frankie, Clio, Edith and Patience must find a way to join together before the secrets they keep; end up with another dead body.

Review -

Hot on the heels of one of my favorite books of 2023, Daisy Darker, Alice Feeney has delivered another murder/mystery that will tease and twist and challenge the reader to their utter delight in Good Bad Girl.

The key to this mystery is who is who. Early on you think you know just who the characters are but as the tale moves forward each person slowly evolves into someone completely different. Who is the victim and who is the savior. Who is the protagonist and who is hero. Feeney does a terrific job of juggling all these in the air as she drives the story forward at an frenetic pace.

What Feeney does so well is weave a web of mystery and subterfuge that the reader is challenged every chapter to rethink what is the actual plot of the novel. Her mysteries are not easily solvable and intriguing with each new morsel of plot that unravels.

Good Bad Girl is a terrific read!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Good Bad Girl
By: Alice Feeney
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Pub Date: 8/29/23

Another spectacular thriller from Alice Feeney! This one begins at the end. A baby is kidnapped from a supermarket but it takes a while to workout who the baby was taken from. There’s a whole cast of characters. Frankie, a young mom who works hard to provide for her now adult daughter, Patience. She works in a prison library and thinks of herself as a good, bad girl.
Patience who has just turned 18 and has run away from her mom Frankie after she refuses to tell her who her father is. She works in a care home.
Edith is 80 and lives in the care home. She was once a supermarket detective but her children treat her terribly.
Clio is Edith’s daughter. She’s a therapist who just plain and simply doesn’t like people and is obsessed with shoes.
Patience meets Edith on her first day working in the home. When she finds her crying in her chair she takes all of her savings to go save her dog from the pound. They become fast friends. When Edith, who just wants to go home, comes up with a plan to escape she gets Patience to help her but a murder has taken place. The director of the care home is dead in the elevator and there is about to be trouble.
When DCI Charlotte Chapman arrives for the murder she also discovers there’s a missing resident. She has 3 suspects, Frankie, Clio and Patience. But who’s guilty?

“A captivating thriller that delves into the complexities of female friendship.”

In “Good Bad Girl,” Alice Feeney returns with another thrilling mystery filled with drama and her trademark surprises. Twenty years after a baby is stolen from a stroller, a woman is murdered in a care home. The two crimes are somehow linked, and a good bad girl may be the key to discovering the truth.

Edith, an eighty-year-young resident of the nursing home, plans her escape. Patience, a caregiver, bonds with Edith but is lying about almost everything. Edith’s daughter, Clio, won’t speak to her, and someone new with ominous intentions is about to knock on Clio’s door.

With every reason to distrust each other, the women must solve a mystery with three suspects, two murders, and one victim. In the style of Daisy Darker and Rock Paper Scissors, “Good Bad Girl” keeps you guessing, and the twists come fast and furious.

If you enjoy psychological suspense with unexpected turns, this book is worth a read

I've really enjoyed the past. Alice Feeney titles but this one wasn't my favorite. I really struggled to get pulled into it and ultimately just couldn't finish this one. Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan audio for the audio ARC.

Okayyy I liked this a lot! Not super shocking, but clever and twisty enough for an entertaining weekend read. Alice Feeney has earned back my trust after what she did to me with Daisy Darke

the audio was okay .

I tried so hard to get into this book and it never happened for me. The author has been recommended to me many times so maybe I will have to try a different book by Feeney. I won a physical ARC from Goodreads and had the audio ARC from NetGalley and it was still so hard to feel invested in the characters and the plot when I guessed the twist from the start. Thank you to NetGalley for the audio ARC!

The story was intriguing but I could not keep up with it on audio. It was hard to follow along and I just had a hard time differentiating the characters. Will try to read a physical book on this one.

While not my favourite Alice Feeney book - I liked some characters a lot more than others and found a few of the 'twists' hard to believe and a bit too coincidental - I did enjoy reading this and it did keep me guessing till the very end. I really enjoyed the narrators as well and thought they did a really good job of selling the story.

Thank you @netgalley and @macmillanaudio for the complimentary audiobook copy of Good Bad Girl.

This is my second book by Alice Feeney and I think, unfortunately, that we aren’t a good match.

She can turn a phrase, mind you. Her writing often had me pausing to jot down a quotation. She pens some great lines about love, mother and daughter relationships, etc. - but the conclusions of the mysteries and plots…woof.


Nothing was resolved in a way that felt satisfying for me. Nothing…

If the last third of the book was retooled completely with all different answers to the various questions, whodunnits, who is really zooming who…this would have likely been a five star read. As it is, I think three stars is as generous as I can be.

Even with different (and compelling) narrators I struggled at times to know whose POV we were in and where in time we were.

There’s a lot of leading women in this book and a lot of confusion. Some of that is likely on purpose, but it felt more unnecessarily convoluted than suspenseful.

All in all a miss for me, but I did fly through it.

I loved her 'Rock Paper Scissors' and thought I would enjoy this as well. However, I was slightly disappointed because the storyline was very similar to some other books I have already read.

Thank you MacMillan Audio for giving me the opportunity to read this!

My advice: pay attention to everything; take nothing for granted; and don’t be too hard on yourself when you are duped at figuring things out. I thoroughly enjoyed this. The pacing is quick and Feeney keeps her readers continually off-balance with shifting perspectives. Here's the thing about audiobooks. Even when the characters are well done, and the narrator does a fantastic job(which they totally did! - I didn't even have to think about which character it was because the narrator's voices were so different), some books you need to hold in your hand to grasp.
Good Bad Girl is one of these books. The narrator can do as amazing of the job as they did, and you'd mostly likely still need to go back and rewind because there are so many details that become important.

I could not get this audiobook to work, but I know that lovers of Alice Feeney will love this one and hopefully enjoy the narration.

Thank you NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ALC in exchange for my honest review.

I thought Katherine Press and Stephanie Racine did an excellent job with the narration. Both voices created a dark, mysterious, and atmospheric picture in my mind as I was listening. There were a lot of different characters in this audiobook and both narrators really pulled it off well. Lots of twists and turns, loved the way Feeney weaved the storyline, and the ending was satisfying! Highly recommend!

I'm not a big fan of this author, but I wanted to give another one of her books a chance. This one was SO slow moving for me. Maybe it was just the time I was reading it and what sort of book I needed in my life at the time.

Thanks for NetGalley, Macmillan Audio, and the author for an ARC copy of this book.

Alice Feeney is an auto-buy author for me. Her twists and the complexity of her plots are always such a treat to read. Good Bad Girl had me fully infested. I haven’t read a thriller quite like this where I had no idea what was going on majority of the book. Around 70% when things started coming together, I was utterly shocked at the reveals. I do have to say, this was more of a slow burn mystery versus a fast paced thriller. There were also quite a few characters and storylines to keep track of so I advise going into this book aware of that. I enjoyed the audiobook but did read along side the physical, which helped me to keep up with the characters. Overall I think this was a solid thriller by one of my favorite authors! Thank you to Netgalley and Flatiron Books for my #gifted ALC!