Beautiful Ugly follows Grady Green, a successful author whose life falls apart when his wife, Abby, disappears after a shocking incident on the road. Despite an investigation, Abby is never found, leaving Grady struggling with grief, guilt and unanswered questions. A year later, unable to move forward or write again, he retreats to a remote Scottish island hoping the peace and isolation will help him escape his memories and begin working on his next novel.
The island setting is one of the strongest parts of the book. It is bleak, isolated and full of odd characters, creating an uneasy atmosphere from the start. Grady is already an unreliable narrator, so when he begins to believe he has seen a woman who looks exactly like Abby, it is hard to know what is real. Is his wife somehow still alive? Is someone deliberately trying to unsettle him? Or is grief and guilt causing him to lose touch with reality?
Initially, I found the mystery genuinely intriguing. Abby’s disappearance, Grady’s troubled state of mind and the strange atmosphere on the island made for a promising start. There was enough tension to make me want to keep reading, and I was interested to see how all the secrets, relationships and different timelines would eventually connect.
Unfortunately, the story went downhill as more was revealed. The twists became increasingly unbelievable and the plot started to feel far too ridiculous to take seriously. Rather than being shocked by the revelations, I found myself questioning how anyone could have behaved the way they did, or how certain events could realistically have happened without being discovered earlier.
I carried on because I hoped the ending would pull everything together and make the increasingly strange plot worthwhile. Sadly, it did not. The final reveals felt more far-fetched than clever, and the resolution did not make up for the amount of disbelief the story required along the way.
For me, Beautiful Ugly was wide of the mark. It had a very strong premise, a suitably creepy setting and an intriguing mystery at the beginning, but it lost its way with an overly complicated and implausible plot. I wanted a tense, clever psychological thriller, but instead I found myself trudging through it and waiting for it to improve.
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Overall: 2 out of 5 stars.
