Some thrillers begin with a scream. What I Did begins with something far more unsettling – a woman standing in an airport, luggage in hand, trying very hard to look like she isn’t running away.
Alison Lyle’s upcoming psychological thriller introduces us to Megan, an artist whose life has narrowed to the shape of one man’s moods. Her fiancé Ryan is charming in company and suffocating behind closed doors, controlling, abusive, the kind of man who mistakes possession for love. When we meet Megan, she is boarding a flight with her best friend Evelyn, bound for a month-long art retreat. On paper, it is a working holiday. In truth, it is an escape.
I read the airport scene the way I once read loan applications – looking for what the paperwork doesn’t say. Megan has planned this exit the way a person plans around a threat: quietly, carefully, leaving no obvious trail. And yet the fear travels with her. She arrives at the retreat with Evelyn at her side, but she cannot unclench. Every knock at the door, every unfamiliar footstep on the gravel, she is bracing for Ryan. And Lyle makes us brace with her.
Because of course he comes. Men like Ryan always do. The retreat, which should have been Megan’s sanctuary, all easels and open skies and the smell of turpentine becomes a place she must survey like a threat map. When Ryan finally appears at her cottage door, the confrontation that follows changes everything. The next morning, his body is found. The police arrive with their notebooks and their careful questions, and Megan finds herself at the centre of a murder investigation: suspected, watched, unravelling.
The title, you realise, is doing quiet work of its own. What I Did; a confession, a question, a defence. Lyle lets it hang over every page.
What impressed me most is the structure. The narrative moves between past and present, and the two timelines are intertwined perfectly, each flashback to Megan’s life with Ryan lands exactly when you need it, recolouring what you thought you understood of the present. This is the dual-timeline done right: not a gimmick, but a slow tightening of the frame.
And then there is the setting. Lyle’s retreat is beautifully depicted, the kind of scenery that belongs on a postcard and yet she renders it attractive and sinister in the same breath. The light that makes a landscape worth painting is the same light that casts long shadows across a cottage staircase. I found myself admiring a description and distrusting it a moment later, which is precisely the effect a psychological thriller should have.
But the true achievement here is Megan herself. Her confusion and fear are palpable on every page; the second-guessing, the hypervigilance, the way an abused woman learns to audit every room she enters for exits. Lyle writes that interior weather with real compassion, never reducing Megan to either victim or suspect. She is a woman first, frightened and flawed and trying to hold her own story together while everyone around her writes a different version of it.
I read this one in great greedy gulps, the way the best thrillers demand to be read. It is engaging from the first page to the last, and it lingers as the best books about survival always do.
If psychological thrillers are your poison of choice, put What I Did on your radar now. I surely recommend it.
My Rating: 4.7/5
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
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