Don’t Let Him In by Lisa Jewell

Format: Audiobook (BorrowBox)
Read: November 2025

It has been a little while since I last read a Lisa Jewell! I have found her to be a bit hit and miss, but even her thrillers that miss are usually still great reads. This one is her latest, and it has a fantastic audiobook cast – Gemma Whelan, Joanne Froggatt, Louise Brealey, Patience Tomlinson, Tamara Payne and Richard Armitage.

I won’t go into an in-depth summary, but the basic plot follows the lives of three main female characters who all have a seemingly (on the surface) too-good-to-be-true man in their life who is always absent, and usually asking for their money. If you’ve ever brushed against a thriller, it’s very clear very early on where all that is going to head!

Lisa Jewell is a master, and even if I knew where the novel was headed, she still knows how to keep things entertaining with well-crafted characters and some well-paced twists and turns. She gives the male character POV chapters, which I found put an interesting spin on the story. His characters were infuriating to listen to – Richard Armitage really nailed the smugness and the arrogance in his performance – but added more dimension to what could have otherwise felt a bit of a tired plot. This character is definitely unreliable as a narrator; he’s narcissistic with a superiority complex, coupled with a deep insecurity. The way he speaks about the women he latches onto is often infantilising, always unsettling and often creepy… I may have developed my own complex over how my scalp smells… I hated him, but I’m glad we got to hear from him.

The blurb uses the adjective “kaleidoscopic” and I think that is apt for how this story unfolds! There are a lot of female characters who appear, but the three main ones are Martha, the florist, the recently widowed Nina and her adult daughter Ash, who is immediately suspicious of Nick. They are all three very different and distinct characters. We don’t get a POV for Nina; her relationship with Nick is told through Ash’s perspective, and Ash has her own host of issues from her father’s death and a fairly recent mental health incident, which is the reason she has moved back home in her late twenties. I love how the author layered Ash’s relationship with her mother and the family dynamic, and how perceived reliability complicated how she felt she could handle her suspicions.

Martha, I am sure this was a very realistic portrayal, but I found her chapters so frustrating because she really needed to ditch the dead weight husband. I think because the mystery unravelling primarily happened in Ash’s chapters, and Martha was always a step or two behind, I wasn’t as gripped by her portion of the story, and they tended to make me feel more queasy because she’s the one struggling in the wake of this man’s current actions, and her and her kids felt the most in danger of their lives being upended.

I was gripped by this book. The final section I even listened to in bed, and I finished the book while on a lunch break at work. Those are not typical audiobook times! (Audiobooks are for cleaning chores, commuting and exercising!).

Time to re-rank the Lisa Jewell’s I’ve read:

1. Then Night She Disappeared
2. Breaking The Dark (I ❤️ Jessica Jones!)
3. Watching You
4. Don’t Let Him In
5. Invisible Girl
6. None Of The Is True
7. The House We Grew Up In
8. Then She Was Gone
9. The Third Wife