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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.

Ten years of marriage. Ten years of secrets. And an anniversary they will never forget.

Rock Paper Scissors is the latest exciting domestic thriller from the queen of the killer twist, New York Times bestselling author Alice Feeney.

Review:

The thriller by Alice Feeney Rock Paper Scissors starts with Adam and Amelia Wright going to an old chapel in Scotland for a weekend away that Amelia won through her work. Adam writes screenplays and Amelia works for a dog rescue, most of the time their life has been pretty decent but lately things in their marriage have been rough. Both of them have plans coming into this weekend (even though they are never clearly explained), but the feeling on both sides is that this is a last ditch effort to save their failing marriage. They arrive in the middle of a snowstorm to an abandoned church, and before too long they start to get suspicious that something about this entire situation is not right, not because of the ulterior motives of Adam or Amelia toward each other but someone else pulling the strings. 

While the story unfolds, I tried really hard to like this novel but there are a few things in the book that just brought me out of the whole thing, basic real life things that should have been researched or reevalutated by someone along the way. Some books have a way for bad information to be forgiven, but Rock Paper Scissors is so detail oriented that it is shocking that some of the details are so poorly chosen.

One of the details that holds me back from really liking this and getting engaged in the novel is about Amelia’s “asthma” and how she has attacks when she is scared or worried, and a few puffs of her inhaler helps with the attacks. Amelia is obviously a liar and s schemer from the beginning, but the asthma angle is really taken seriously. These moments when she needs the inhaler are not asthma attacks but panic attacks. Being scared does not trigger an attack. Environmental factors like smoke, pet dander, molds, and dust are things that will cause asthma issues, not being frightened or in a stressful situation. She does not need her inhaler at all except for a psychological reason, and it would have been prefectly fine if she would have said this, that she used her “asthma” as a distraction from when she needed to change the mood, maybe even having her mention that the inhaler was empty, had been empty for months and was just a prop. Instead it is taken seriously in the few scenes when it comes up (not during the final climax however.). This niggling detail does not have any bearing on the end of the story whatsoever except that this is a person who has never been told about her actual problems. 

Another thing that does not happen is bats in the wintertime. At one point the characters go to the bell tower where there are bats. Bats either migrate to a warmer climate or hibernate in a warmer place during the winter, especially during snowstorm weather. When Adam has an encounter with the bats, they are in the belltower, in the freezing, and they are ready to fly everywhere. The actual nature of bats is that they would be in a warmer, dark place if they don’t migrate, like in the chapel cellar or in a nearby cave. It makes absolutely no sense that something that took me two seconds to look up on the internet was not something worth the bother for Alice Feeney.

These things brought me almost completely out of the story, but I tried to stay focused. The story was somewhat interesting, even though there are many moments of that are a little too convenient. Some of the writing and turns of phrase are great. Some sentences are interesting enough to reread and think about for a second or two before continuing, but by the third act, I was ready for this all to be over. The mystery was not very deep and there was not really too much danger in any of it. Most of the actions that happens could have been prevented if people were just honest with one another. As it is, there seems to be a sense of thrill lacking in the novel, and this makes for a book that is well written but a mediocre story.