Find You First by Linwood Barclay (Review by Stacey Lorenson)

Rating: 4.0

Find You First starts off at like a slow bus ride and ends with the frenetic pace of a jetliner. Barclay has managed to a create a multilayered web of characters that leaves the reader wondering how they will all eventually intersect.

Barclay begins by introducing his main character, Miles Cookson, millionaire techie and App creator, who discovers he is suffering from a terminal illness prompting him to find his nine biological children which he fathered as a college-student sperm donor. His search immediately introduces him to Chole, one of his offspring. The two immediately forge a connection and embark on what turns out to be a harrowing odyssey of finding the remaining eight siblings. The antagonists in the story, bring new meaning to the phrase ‘parent from hell’, adding a slightly psychotic element to the story.  Someone else knows Miles is leaving his fortune to the remaining children (now adults) and is eliminating them, one by one. Miles and Chole must stop the murders while simultaneously solving who would be capable of doing such a thing.

Barclay skillfully incorporates the ideal of what constitutes the title of “parent” and examines the ideology of “family”, as the subplot. The nine siblings all come from a variety of social backgrounds and have uniquely different experiences with their parents. Barclay parlays the children’s lives with how they were raised within their family units and what kind of adults they turned out to be. Find You First has a style reminiscent of A.J. Finn (The Woman in the Window) and Paula Hawkins (Girl on the Train), bullet speed and all consuming! This one will leave you up, at all hours of the night, until you reach the end!