At the request of her dying mother, Riah Arora has pressed pause on her life of crime to search for her long-lost twin. However, instead of the heartwarming reunion and instant bond we may expect from stories of siblings separated at birth, their meeting is far from something out of a fairy tale. Anjali Murphy may share Riah’s face, but she is a stranger, one with a seemingly picture-perfect life and enormous wealth that Riah yearns to have. Presented with an opportunity to temporarily switch lives, Riah sees a chance to strike, not realizing her twin has laid a trap of her own. When she wakes up in hospital mistaken for Anjali, and accused of a murder she doesn’t remember committing, Riah’s plan for a clean escape is shattered; her only hope is to uncover the truth.

Jass Aujla’s debut novel Next of Twin has all the makings of a gripping crime fiction – a morally grey suspect with a murky past that she hides even from herself, a police detective with a “sixth sense” and a thirst for answers, and an original, enthralling mystery that will keep readers glued to the pages. Beyond challenging preconceptions of familial and marital relationships and tropes such as the good twin versus the evil twin, Aujla expertly subverts readers’ expectations throughout the novel.

We are given the basics right from the beginning: the characters’ motives, the lead up to the crime, the circumstantial evidence. By choosing to tell the story from the perspectives of multiple characters, even minor ones, we are given a seemingly omniscient view of the crime, and wait for the novel’s police detectives to catch up. However, like any good thriller writer, Aujla plays with our grasp of the truth. The story of the crime is constantly rewritten, compelling readers to scour the evidence they’ve been presented with for clues they missed, all of which are expertly hidden in plain sight.

Next of Twin explores, with nuance, themes of domestic abuse, the morality of crime, and healing from the past through accountability. While these explorations are significant and effective, they feel too brief and the conclusion too rushed. Spending more time in the characters’ heads to explore how they are emotionally impacted by their experiences would have been valuable. Nonetheless, Next of Twin is an engrossing read that is bound to leave an impression.