Rock Paper Scissors

What's inside (9 sections)

1. Mr and Mrs Wright drive north
2. Anniversary letters and the hand game
3. Blackwater Chapel does not behave
4. Robin, Henry Winter, and who wrote what
5. A teenage car, a dead mother, and face blindness
6. Locked doors and scissors
7. What works cold and what slips
8. Key takeaways
9. FAQ

I started Rock Paper Scissors on a rainy night when I wanted something fast with a cold setting and people keeping secrets. Alice Feeney published it in 2021, Flatiron Books put out the US hardcover first edition at 304 pages, and the UK edition came a few weeks earlier from HarperCollins. I had read His and Hers and I knew Feeney likes narrators who hold back. This one is built around a married couple who drive into the Scottish Highlands for a weekend that is supposed to save them. It does not save them in any normal way.

The hook is easy to pitch. Amelia and Adam Wright have been married ten years. Adam writes screenplays, mostly adaptations, and he lives with face blindness. He cannot recognize faces, not even his wife, which means he relies on voice and hair and clothes and context. Amelia works for an animal charity and won a weekend trip in a work raffle. The prize is a stay at Blackwater Chapel, a converted chapel in a remote spot in Scotland, with their dog Bob along for the ride. A snowstorm moves in. The power acts strange. Someone is watching from the trees and from the windows.

I read most of it in two sittings because the chapters are short and they cut between Amelia now, Adam now, anniversary letters signed Your Wife, and later a third voice. Feeney wants you to pick a side and then feel bad about picking it. Both Wrights lie. Both plan to use the weekend for their own ends. Neither understands what the chapel really is.

Mr and Mrs Wright drive north

Amelia narrates with a tired, funny edge. She loves Adam but she is worn down by ten years of small cuts. He works late. He forgets things that matter to her. He keeps his phone close and his thoughts closer. She tells herself the chapel weekend could reset them. Fresh air. No London noise. Time to talk without screens. Under that hope is another plan. She has packed something she should not have packed and she has decided this trip will settle the marriage one way or another.

Adam narrates with more caution. He explains face blindness plainly. He has lived with it since childhood. He cannot pick his wife out of a crowd by sight. He memorizes her laugh and her walk and the red coat she wears. At parties he smiles at strangers who know him. At work he pretends more than he admits. He is a screenwriter who once wrote an original script called Rock Paper Scissors about a couple who use the hand game to make choices. It never got made. Now he adapts novels by a famous reclusive writer named Henry Winter, which pays well and leaves him feeling hollow.

The drive north sets the mood. Snow starts early. Roads narrow. Phone signal fades. Adam notices that Amelia left his phone back at the house, which means they are truly cut off. Amelia notices that Adam seems nervous in a way that has nothing to do with ice. Bob the dog pants in the back seat and then goes quiet when the chapel appears through the trees. It is not cozy. It is stone and tall windows and a graveyard nearby. The caretaker has left firewood and a note, but no caretaker in sight.

Feeney is good at making a building feel like a third person in the marriage. Doors stick. Lights go out in the cellar. The bedroom upstairs has been painted the same color as their bedroom at home, with bedding that looks familiar. Amelia finds it sweet and then creepy. Adam finds it familiar in a way he cannot place. I felt the temperature drop a few degrees every time they found another locked room.

My own weekend trips have never involved a chapel, but I know that feeling of arriving somewhere that looked better in photos. You tell each other it will be fine. You unpack too fast. You start noticing what is missing. Feeney stretches that unease across forty pages without rushing to a body.

Anniversary letters and the hand game

Between the present chapters are letters. Each year on their anniversary, Adam's wife writes him a letter she never lets him read. The letters follow traditional gifts. Paper for year one. Cotton for year two. Leather and wood and iron as the years stack. They start tender and become strained. They mention money and work and miscarriage scares and moves and fights about nothing that were really fights about everything.

The hand game runs through the marriage too. When they cannot decide, they play rock paper scissors. Stay in or go out. Talk now or later. Stay together or split. It started as a joke when they were young and broke. It became a habit and then a crutch. Adam likes it because it gives chance a vote. Amelia likes it because it forces an answer when talk loops. By year ten the game feels less playful. It feels like asking a coin to do the work of honesty.

Feeney uses the letters to slow time. We learn how they met, how fast they married, how Adam's career grew through Henry Winter adaptations, how Amelia drifted from friend to wife to someone keeping score. We learn that both cheated, or think the other cheated, or half confess. The letters sound intimate, which is why they work as misdirection. You assume you know who wrote them. You assume you know who Your Wife means.

I found myself flipping back to early letters once the middle hit, checking dates and small details. That is the point. Feeney plants objects that return. A coat. A song. A scar. A dog toy. A red kimono that appears on a bed when it should not be there. None of it feels random on a second look, even if the first look feels foggy on purpose.

The fair warning here is that the device asks a lot of patience. If you dislike books that withhold the basic who is speaking, the first third may irritate you. I almost put it down around page eighty because everyone seemed to be lying about small things for no clear reason. Staying with it paid off for me, but readers who want clean points of view may struggle.

Blackwater Chapel does not behave

The middle of the book is all weather and house. Snow piles against the doors. The car gets stuck and then worse, two flat tires that look less like bad luck the longer you stare. The power cuts in parts of the chapel. The cellar traps Amelia for frightening minutes when the lights die and she has to feel her way up with her asthma tightening. Adam finds her inhaler and gets her out, and for a moment they are kind to each other in the old way.

Bob disappears, which is the oldest fear for anyone who has traveled with a dog. They call and call. They check the cottage nearby. They find a drawer with clippings about an actress named October, who was connected to Henry Winter and to Adam's work. They find a short history of the chapel that mentions deaths and stories about hauntings. They hear barking that stops too soon. Bob turns up with the neighbor, a woman who lives in the cottage and who seems to know more than she says.

That neighbor is Robin. She is quiet and watchful and polite in a way that feels off. She watches the chapel from her windows. She appears on paths without sound. She leaves notes. She knows where the firewood is and which doors stick. Amelia catches her looking through chapel glass and feels watched in her own bedroom. Adam feels he should know her and cannot place why, which for a man with face blindness is both normal and alarming.

Feeney piles on classic cold house trouble. Loose stones near the belfry. A crypt that should stay shut. A mirror with writing. A bedroom staged to match home. A cellar that goes dark at the worst second. Some of it is a little much. The power fails exactly when someone is alone downstairs. The car fails exactly when they think about leaving. If you want strict realism about electrics and tires, you will roll your eyes. I decided to read it as a stage play where the house helps the people say what they came to say.

What kept me reading was not the flickering lights. It was the small married details inside the scare scenes. Who carries the flashlight. Who apologizes first. Who makes tea after a fright. Who checks on the dog before checking on each other. Feeney knows how long couples can argue about a locked door when they really mean ten years of hurt.

Robin, Henry Winter, and who wrote what

Robin gets her own chapters and the book tilts. She grew up around Blackwater Chapel. She is the daughter of Henry Winter, the famous writer whose books Adam adapts. Henry was a recluse who rarely showed his face, which later matters for reasons I will keep vague but which reframe a lot of publishing gossip in the story. Robin worked in London. She knew Amelia before Amelia knew Adam, or more exactly Amelia knew her at work and then crossed a line that cannot be uncrossed.

The marriage history reorders itself once Robin talks. Adam was married before. His first wife was Robin. Amelia and Adam began as an affair while Adam was still with Robin. Robin found them together and left. Adam married Amelia. Work ties tangled with love ties because Robin helped connect Adam to Henry's books. So the raffle prize that brought the Wrights to Scotland was not random. Robin made it happen to get them back to the chapel and force a choice.

The anniversary letters also reorder. They were not written by Amelia. They were written by Robin, year by year, starting before the affair and continuing after the divorce. Some were never meant to be read. One late letter, keyed to silk for year twelve, is meant to be read and it lays out terms. Leave Amelia and write together, or try to leave with Amelia and see what happens, or refuse to choose and learn what the third option costs. The rock paper scissors choice is literal now. Rock to run. Paper to return. Scissors for something sharper.

Henry Winter's shadow sits over all of it. He hired a private investigator at one point. He kept files. He controlled Robin with money and threats and with the kind of literary power that makes young writers agree to bad deals. He is dead two years by the time the Wrights arrive, buried near the chapel under a stone that does not tell the full story. Adam thought Henry was angry that he stopped adapting and tried his own work. The truth is closer and sadder and tied to a teenage night Adam barely remembers correctly.

I will not quote the letters because their power is cumulative, but their shape is fair to describe. Early letters are hopeful about a flat and a job and a future. Middle letters track success that feels empty, trips to France and New York, a glamorous friend who dies badly, jealousy that curdles. Late letters are colder and more certain. Whoever holds the pen knows things the other characters will not say out loud.

A teenage car, a dead mother, and face blindness

The core secret is a car crash from years ago. When Adam was a teenager, he went joyriding in a stolen car with a girl he liked. They were drunk and young and stupid. They hit someone on a dark road. That someone was Adam's mother. Adam got out and ran. The girl drove away. Because Adam cannot recognize faces, he never knew for sure who the girl was. He carried guilt without a clear image to attach it to.

Robin tells Adam that the girl was Amelia. She says Amelia was driving or present and that she helped cover it, then built a marriage on top of it without telling him. Whether every word of Robin's version is exact is part of the tension. Adam believes enough of it to confront Amelia in the locked chapel with snow high outside. Amelia says she was there but that Adam was driving, that he got out and she panicked and drove, that blame is shared and memory is warped by drink and years and shame.

This is where face blindness stops being background and becomes plot. Adam cannot check his memory against a face. He has to check it against behavior and paper and what people stood to gain. Feeney does not present this as a medical lecture. She presents it as a daily strain that becomes a crisis when the past matters. Who was in the car. Who visited the hospital. Who wrote which letter. Who stood at which door. A man who cannot trust sight has to trust story, and everyone around him tells good stories.

There is also the matter of October, the actress whose career crossed Adam's, and whose death by pills sits in the background like a warning about fame and use. Adam adapted Henry's books that made October bigger. Money flowed. Favors were traded. The private investigator named Sam followed people for years and filed reports that surface too late to prevent anything. None of these side threads are clean, and that is intentional. Hollywood and publishing in this book run on favors and silence.

I found this section both strong and shaky. Strong because the car crash reframes the whole marriage without feeling tacked on. The guilt explains why Adam clings to rituals and why Amelia writes or does not write and why both drink more than they admit. Shaky because it depends on a teenager never learning the name of the girl in the car, which asks a lot even with face blindness. Schools and police and parents would normally fill that gap. Feeney rushes past those practical questions to get to the chapel confrontation.

Locked doors and scissors

The last act stays inside the chapel for a long stretch. Robin locks Adam and Amelia in and slides a letter under the door. Snow keeps falling. The power stutters. Adam reads and then accuses. Amelia denies parts and admits others. She comes at him with a knife she brought for protection that now looks like intent. Robin comes through a hidden way with scissors and uses them on Amelia to stop her. It happens fast and it is ugly, not clever. That bluntness surprised me after so much misdirection.

What follows is quieter and stranger. Adam and Robin bury Amelia in the grounds where other Winter secrets rest. They return to London together. Robin finishes or issues books under Henry's name because his absence is easy to fake and his brand still sells. Adam adapts them. They live as a couple again, working on a project called Rock Paper Scissors that mixes his old script with her letters. Bob the dog stays with them. To the outside world it looks like a fresh start. Inside the pages it feels like a new set of locked rooms.

Sam the investigator drives to Scotland late, finds the grave changed and a glass box on top with a paper frame and scissors and a ring on a severed finger, and flees. The stone that once read like a proud father marker now points at a killing. It is a grim image and Feeney leaves it without much comment. Someone knows. No one with power to act seems ready to act.

Spoilers aside, the mechanics work if you accept the premise that Robin could stage the raffle and the chapel dressing and the letters without being caught. She knows the building. She knows the habits of both Wrights. She has time and money from the Winter estate and she has patience from years of being overlooked. Amelia thinks she is smarter and stronger than Robin right up to the moment she is not. Adam thinks passivity will protect him right up to the moment he has to choose.

What works cold and what slips

The best parts are pace and structure. Short chapters. Three voices that sound different. Letters that reward rereading. A house that keeps producing new rooms. A dog the reader worries about more than the humans, which Feeney uses well. The face blindness detail is more than a quirk. It shapes how Adam moves through parties and sets and crime scenes, always a half beat behind, always asking for confirmation he does not get.

The writing about marriage has bite. Who controls money. Who cleans up. Who remembers anniversaries and who performs remembering. Who says sorry to end a fight rather than to admit fault. Amelia counting Adam's late nights. Adam counting Amelia's spending or tone. Both keeping mental ledgers while saying they want honesty. Anyone who has lived with someone will recognize the accounting even if their own fights never involved a chapel.

The fair criticism is that the twists crowd each other. Letters switched. Wife switched. Father faked. Raffle faked. Car driver switched. Each twist alone would carry a chapter. Stacked together they can feel engineered, especially in the last sixty pages where revelations arrive every few pages. I believed the marriage pain more than the publishing scheme. A daughter ghostwriting as a dead famous father for years without detection asks a lot, even with reclusiveness as cover.

Character sympathy is thin by design but it still cost me something. Amelia starts sharp and becomes harder to like as her plans show. Adam drifts and withholds until drifting looks like guilt. Robin is the most vivid and also the most ruthless, and the ending rewards her in a way that may anger readers who want justice. If you need one decent person to root for, Bob the dog carries that load and even he gets used as bait.

I would still recommend it to thriller readers who like unreliable narration and winter houses and who did not mind the turns in Sometimes I Lie or His and Hers. Go in knowing the chapel logic is theatrical and the letter logic needs your attention. Do not read the final letters fast. Let the dates settle. Keep track of who benefits each time a fact changes hands. The last image of the grave and the glass box stayed with me longer than the scares, because it says the story is not over even when the couple at the center stops talking.

FAQ

When was Rock Paper Scissors published?

Flatiron Books published the US first edition on September 7, 2021. It runs 304 pages with ISBN 9781250266101.

Who are the main characters?

Amelia and Adam Wright, a married couple on a forced anniversary trip, plus Robin and Henry Winter, whose past controls the chapel weekend.

Is it cozy or gory?

No. It is bleak and violent with murder, manipulation, and a dog used as bait. It suits thriller readers who like unreliable narration and winter houses.