During Bookreporter.com’s end of the year event, a fellow reviewer named “Don’t Let Him In” by Lisa Jewell as one of his top two picks for 2025 — high praise indeed. I decided that I wanted to make sure to include this one in my 2025 book reviews, and boy, am I glad that I did. This novel is a masterpiece of suspense, and using different points of view and different narrators to provide us with significant insight into the characters. Her choice to make Nick Radcliffe, the man at the center of the novel, tell his story in first person narrative is brilliant as his narrative, at first seemingly rational, becomes more and more unhinged as the novel progresses.

We meet the Swann family whose patriarch, Paddy, has passed away. On his way home, he was pushed onto the tracks as a train was approaching, and they are mourning his absence. Nina, his wife, has taken over his successful restaurants, and Ash, their 26-year-old daughter, is still living at home after a mental breakdown. When Nick Radcliffe, a stranger, sends a condolence card, he tells them he worked with Paddy years before in a restaurant. Then, he sends a Zippo lighter that he claims was Paddy’s and that Paddy had gifted to him. The correspondence between Nick and Nina continues and eventually they meet. Nick seems the perfect gentleman, handsome, kind, considerate, polite. But Ash feels that there’s something off about him.

There’s other narratives with different points of view, some from four years ago and some contemporaneous with Ash and Nina’s story. Nick tells us that four years earlier, he met and fell in love with Martha. She’s a divorced woman with two sons, a lovely cottage in a charming village, and a flower shop. She’s exactly what he wants; he’s madly in love with her, and she’s madly in love with him.

But there’s also Tara, whose husband is constantly asking for money. And as the story continues, there are more women, more lies, more terrible truths uncovered about Nick, Alistair, and his other aliases. But we still don’t know the whole story, and Jewell carefully doles out the sordid details slowly and superbly, leaving us turning pages in our quest to discover the extent of the atrocities committed on these women. By the end of the novel, we are questioning the veracity of everything we’ve read. What is true and what is a lie?

Perhaps even scarier than the novel itself is when Jewell writes, at the end, “Simon Smith (Nick Radcliffe’s real name in the novel) is not an outlandish literary confection. He does exist in this world.” And she lists sources that helped her understand and create the perfidious Simon Smith. There are really men out there who are doing just what happens in this novel — well, maybe not exactly what happens, but certainly the scamming part. In fact, my stepfather lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a romantic scam after my mother died. Be careful out there, and definitely be careful whom you let in.

This review is based on the hardcover book provided by Atria Books, the publisher, for review purposes.