Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: Find You First by Linwood Barclay

Canadian author Linwood Barclay worked as a journalist for 30 years before taking up writing fiction full time. His first stand-alone thriller No Time for Goodbye (Bantam, 2007) is one of my all-time favorite books and is one I often recommend. He’s written 20 novels so far. The most recent is Find You First (Morrow, 2021); his next one is due to be released in May 2022.

In Find You First, tech whiz Miles Cookson is at the top of his game professionally and financially when he learns he has a hereditary terminal illness. His doctor tells him that had his parents not died young, one or the other was sure to have developed it, but since Miles did not have children, the chain would break with him. Miles isn’t so sure; when he was in college and broke, he donated sperm to a fertility clinic. He decides to find whatever children he fathered and to leave money to them for the health care they will need.

The clinic’s records are locked down but anyone as wealthy as Miles is can find a way to access information. Once he had the names of his children, he turned them over to his investigators. In the meantime Chloe Swanson, one of those children, has been searching for her birth father. She and Miles meet and begin to contact the others. Except the others turn up missing or dead. Miles is frantic to track the survivors down to protect them and to learn who is killing his children and why.

A dissolute pair who look and act remarkably similar to the late Jeffrey Epstein and his companion Ghislaine Maxwell are key to a secondary plot. Barclay is at least the second author I discovered to have incorporated this sordid bit of reality into a fictional account and at least the second to capitalize on the far-reaching effects of DNA testing.

I heard Barclay talk at a ThrillerFest a few years ago. He said that he wrote about the things that made him anxious and that his children made him anxious. I noticed afterward that often a child is in jeopardy in his books. The children age in the later titles, presumably because Barclay’s children aged as well. In this book the children are in fact young adults but the parent/child relationship is still strong.

Barclay is an old hand at constructing a suspenseful story and he displays his skill to full advantage here. Starred reviews from Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. Highly recommended, as are his other novels.

·         Publisher: ‎ William Morrow (May 4, 2021)

·         Language: ‎ English

·         Hardcover: ‎ 448 pages

·         ISBN-10: ‎ 0062678310

·         ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0062678317

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2022

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.