Don’t Let Him In by Lisa Jewell – Review

He’s the perfect man. It’s a perfect lie.

Nina Swann is intrigued when she received a condolence card from Nick Radcliffe, an old friend of her late husband, who is looking to connect after her husband’s unexpected death. Nick is a man of substance and good taste. He has a smile that could melt the coldest heart and a knack for putting others at ease. But to Nina’s adult daughter, Ash, Nick seems too slick, too polished, too good to be true. Without telling her mother, Ash begins digging into Nick’s past. What she finds is more than unsettling…

Martha is a florist living in a neighboring town with her infant daughter and her devoted husband, Alistair. But lately, Alistair has been traveling more and more frequently for work, disappearing for days at a time. When Martha questions him about his frequent absences, he always has a legitimate explanation, but Martha can’t share the feeling that something isn’t right.

Nina, Martha, and Ash are on a collision course with a shocking truth that is far darker than anyone could have imagined. And all three are about to wish they had heeded the same warning: Don’t let him in.

Purchase Link: Don’t Let Him In

I picked up Don’t Let Him In because Lisa Jewell has been on my radar for a long time. I kept seeing her books everywhere, Book of the Month, Instagram, buddy reads, and they always looked compelling. When a fellow Bookstagrammer suggested a buddy read, this felt like the perfect place to start.

Reading this as a buddy read was honestly a challenge in the best way. We limited ourselves to ten chapters a day, and that restraint was painful. This is the kind of book you want to inhale in one sitting. Every time I stopped, it took real effort not to keep going because I needed to know what was happening next.

The structure of this story is one of its strongest points. There are multiple points of view, and early on it can feel intentionally disorienting. You are not always sure who is speaking, who can be trusted, or how each perspective fits into the bigger picture. That foggy confusion worked so well here because it mirrors the manipulation happening within the story itself. As the layers slowly begin to connect, you realize that these seemingly separate lives are orbiting the same dark truth without knowing it.

What made this book especially gripping was watching the plot unfold from perspectives that were completely unaware of one another. Each character holds only a fragment of the truth, and as the reader, you are piecing together a much larger and more dangerous picture. The inclusion of flashbacks adds depth and shows that this story is not a single moment in time, but something that has been evolving and twisting over years.

Ash stood out immediately. She is perceptive, intelligent, and observant in ways that felt deeply realistic. She notices when things don’t line up and refuses to ignore that discomfort, even when she is met with resistance or disbelief. Watching her question what others are willing to overlook was both empowering and frustrating, especially because so many characters around her refuse to see what is right in front of them.

Many of the characters in this book frustrated me, but that frustration felt intentional. They felt real. People do not always make the right decisions. They ignore red flags. They rationalize harmful behavior. And sometimes they only understand the danger when it is already too late. That realism made the tension feel even heavier.

The antagonistic elements of this story were unsettling. These were the kinds of characters you love to hate, the ones that make your stomach tighten and your skin crawl. What made them even more effective was that their cruelty was not random. The story gives insight into how pain, mental health struggles, and past trauma can warp someone into something dangerous. It never excuses the behavior, but it explains it in a way that makes it terrifyingly believable.

The most striking aspect of this book was the constant sense of peril. There are characters who are already in danger without realizing it. Watching them move closer and closer to harm while being unaware of what is happening created an almost breath-holding tension. It was agonizing in the best possible way.

At its core, this story explores emotional and psychological manipulation, particularly how easily it can happen when trust is misplaced. It highlights how difficult it is to prove that something is wrong when the damage is emotional rather than physical. The isolation, self-doubt, and disbelief that women face when trying to name that harm felt painfully accurate and deeply impactful.

This was my first Lisa Jewell book, and it absolutely will not be my last. I was completely engrossed from beginning to end, and I cannot wait to read more of her work.

LISA JEWELL was born in London in 1968.

Her first novel, Ralph’s Party, was the best- selling debut novel of 1999. Since then she has written another twenty novels, most recently a number of dark psychological thrillers, including The Girls, Then She Was Gone, The Family Upstairs, The Family Remains and The Night She Disappeared, all of which were Richard & Judy Book Club picks.

Lisa is a New York Times and Sunday Times number one bestselling author who has been published worldwide in over thirty languages. She lives in north London with her husband and two daughters.