Cover detail of Find You First by Linwood Barclay showing a woman running wearing a yellow coat

Find you First by Linwood Barclay

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

Apologies for the lateness of the post today, I have stayed up until 1.30pm to watch the Triathlon! It has been very exciting indeed and Team GB have won two silvers. Yay! Congratulations to all the athletes who have taken part. They are truly amazing and in such difficult conditions (hello humidity, hot temperature and a rogue boat at the start!). The Triathlon Team relay is due to take place at the end of the week and I have my matchsticks ready to prop open my eyes for the day after.

Read my review of Relentless by Alistair Brownlee

I am venturing into summer reads territory for this this post and am loving it. When I go away for a summer holiday, I tend to take a mix of good thrillers and light frothy summery novels. One beach holiday in Barbados saw me reading a Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child set in the snowy wilderness of Nebraska. With the temperature not dipping below 30 degrees, I needed all my powers of imagination that day. Whilst Jack Reacher was bundled up in nothing more than a thick shirt ready to catch the bad guys in -4 temperatures, I sipped from a cocktail in a hollowed-out coconut shell. Yum!

Read my pick of the summer reads

So I'm kicking off with a jolly good thriller from the brilliant Linwood Barclay. Most of my family have read the majority of his novels and this one did not disappoint.

Plot (From The Inside Cover)

Tech billionaire Miles has more money than he can ever spend, and everything he could dream of - except time. Now facing a terminal illness, Miles knows he must seize every minute to put his life in order. And that means taking a long, hard look at his past.
Somewhere out there, Miles has children. And they might be about to inherit both the good and the bad from him - possibly his fortune, possibly something more sinister.
So Miles decides to track down his missing children. But a vicious killer is one step ahead of him. One by one, people are vanishing. Not just disappearing, every trace of them is being wiped.

My Thoughts

People talk about page turners, Linwood Barclay defines it. I could not put this down! I ended up reading this over 3 days, and you know the kind of book where you look forward to going to bed just to carry on reading....well that!

The plot is great, fairly extraordinary, but Linwood Barclay makes it all work beautifully. Especially as he has used a particularly close to real life character that is extremely close to the real thing.

During my reading of the book, I did the classic suspect everyone and everything! - all the stories are presented to the reader and it is left to you to unpick and work a way through hopefully before all is revealed in a satisfying conclusion at the end.

The characters are great - Miles and Chloe are very likeable and I loved his Stephen King-esque descriptions of other secondary characters such as Travis. We really get that feel for his everyday life.

In conclusion, this is a real page turner, a great thriller with characters frighteningly close to some real life monsters. If you are looking for a gripping read then this may be the book for you!