Alibi (CJ Skuse) Books in Order

The Alibi Girl is built around a simple but unnerving idea: the woman at the center of the story is never just one woman. Joanne Haynes is not her real name, and almost every ordinary conversation becomes a chance for her to slip into somebody else. One day she might be a successful novelist. Another day she might be a patient, a mother, or someone with a whole invented life ready to go. The book turns that habit into suspense from the first page.

That matters because Joanne is not doing this for fun. She is hiding, coping, performing, and trying to feel safe in a life that never quite feels secure. The setting is ordinary, shops, waiting rooms, the seafront, work, neighbours, familiar faces, but Skuse uses that ordinariness well. Every errand becomes a test. Every question from a stranger can feel dangerous. The more routine the scene looks, the stranger Joanne's inner world begins to feel.

At the center of the story is a woman who wants two things that do not sit easily together. She wants invisibility, because being noticed might expose her. But she also wants comfort, connection, and the freedom to imagine better versions of herself. That push and pull gives the novel its emotional bite. Joanne can be funny, needy, reckless, childish, sad, and clever all at once, which means the book is never only about plot. It is also about loneliness and the stories people tell to survive.

Every conversation is a performance.

The pressure rises when it seems the past may have found its way back to her. A death that hits too close, a growing sense of being watched, and the fear that her carefully arranged life could collapse at any moment all push the book toward thriller territory. Skuse keeps the big truths back for a while, so the tension comes not just from what will happen next, but from trying to work out who Joanne really is beneath the stack of aliases.

Tonally, this story sits a little differently from Sweetpea. It still has dark humour, and it still likes damaged, difficult women, but it is more melancholy and more intimate. The suspense comes from identity, trauma, memory, and isolation rather than from a body count or a cat-and-mouse hunt. If you like psychological thrillers that stay close to one unstable mind and let character do as much work as plot, this is what to expect from the Alibi page.

The question hanging over it all is whether a life built on disguise can ever feel real.