His and Hers Summary

His and Hers is built on a distinctive three-voice structure of short, alternating chapters:

Structure at a glance

• "Hers" chapters. Narrated by Anna Andrews, the news anchor with memory gaps
• "His" chapters. Narrated by DCI Jack Harper, the detective on the case
• "Killer" chapters. An anonymous voice that runs through the whole book
• Blackdown murders. The plot follows a string of killings of women from Anna's past
• The reveal. Identities and motives are withheld until the final act

The two unreliable protagonists plus the killer's voice keep the reader suspecting almost everyone.

This summary of His and Hers by Alice Feeney begins when news anchor Anna Andrews is unexpectedly sent to cover a murder in Blackdown, the small town where she grew up and which she fled years earlier. The victim is Rachel Hopkins, a woman from Anna's old school friend group. Leading the investigation is DCI Jack Harper, Anna's estranged ex-husband, whose marriage to Anna fell apart after the death of their baby daughter, Charlotte. From the start, both Anna and Jack have reasons to hide their connections to the case.

The narrative alternates between Anna's chapters ("Hers"), Jack's chapters ("His"), and a chilling anonymous "Killer" voice. Anna is revealed to be a high-functioning alcoholic with genuine gaps in her memory, which makes her an unreliable narrator, even to herself. Jack, meanwhile, is hiding that he had been secretly sleeping with the victim, Rachel, and that incriminating evidence could point to him. As the investigation proceeds, both protagonists look increasingly guilty, and the reader is pulled back and forth between suspecting each of them.

As told in this His and Hers summary, more women connected to Anna's teenage years are murdered, and old wounds are reopened. Anna slowly recovers the memory of a horrific event from her sixteenth birthday, a night on which she was assaulted in a betrayal enabled by her so-called friends, after which she fled Blackdown for good. The dead women are linked to that night, suggesting the killings are an act of revenge. Suspicion also falls on a mysterious figure, Catherine "Cat" Kelly, a girl from the edges of Anna's old friend group who seems to have reinvented herself.

The tension builds as the police close in and personal betrayals multiply. Feeney layers misdirection upon misdirection, Anna, Jack, and Cat each seem, at different moments, to be the murderer. Evidence is planted, alibis crumble, and the line between victim and perpetrator blurs. By the time the story hurtles toward its climax in the woods around Blackdown, almost no one appears fully innocent, setting up one of the genre's more surprising final twists.

His and Hers ends with a double twist that overturns everything the reader has assumed. In the climax, the pieces seem to point to Catherine "Cat" Kelly as the killer, a woman who had reinvented her identity and who confronts Anna in the woods. It looks as though the mystery of the Blackdown murders is finally solved with Cat as the culprit.

But in the final act, the true killer is revealed to be Anna's mother, Alice. In a chilling confession, Alice admits she has been faking her dementia for years, using the assumption that a frail old woman could never be dangerous as the perfect cover. After discovering what had been done to Anna at her sixteenth birthday party, Alice blamed Rachel, Zoe, and Helen, the women who had betrayed her daughter and driven her from home, and murdered them one by one in revenge. She also killed Anna's father years earlier and buried him, and she manipulated events, including planting evidence, to shift the blame onto others.

Alice frames her monstrous acts as the ultimate expression of a mother's love, insisting her devotion to Anna is "constant, continual, relentless." The conclusion of this summary of His and Hers is deliberately unsettling: Anna, now reunited with Jack and expecting a child, learns the truth through her mother's confession, forcing her to reckon with the fact that the murders that upended her life were committed for her. Feeney leaves lingering, ambiguous threads, including the suggestion that the observant officer Priya may suspect the truth, ending the novel on a quietly ominous note.

Here are some of the most striking quotes from His and Hers by Alice Feeney. These verbatim lines capture the novel's themes of hidden danger, unreliable perception, and mothers and daughters:

"No one expects a woman to be a serial killer. Add the sin of old age. Mistake determination for dementia. There I am. The picture of frailty."

"There are two kinds of women: those who spend a lifetime trying not to turn into their mothers, and those who literally seem to want nothing more."

These His and Hers quotes are widely shared because they capture the killer's chilling logic and Feeney's sharp insight into identity, family, and the assumptions we make about who could be dangerous.