Find You First by Linwood Barclay
My good friend and avid reader, Dave Smith, put me on to Barclay a few years back. That’s why at the end of this short review, I have included some comments from him about Barclay and additional comments from Phil Jones who, like Dave, is a perceptive reader, particularly of the thriller genre.
This review is relatively short because I am loath to give away crucial details about the page-turning plot. It is also fairly short because the book is constructed like a complex jigsaw whose pieces seem to pop out just when you think you have them fitted into place.
Here’s the set up. Miles Cookson is a billionaire tech giant who discovers that he has Huntington’s, an untreatable, progressive and nasty disease. Miles has some of Mark Zuckerberg about him…well except he’s not mad or unscrupulous. He is highly intelligent, driven, slightly self-absorbed and someone with no steady partner or family. After rationalising the shock of his diagnosis, he becomes obsessed by one thing: there is a fifty fifty chance that any children he has will inherit the disease. And there you have it, I fibbed: he does have a family but not of the conventional sort. As a young man, he donated to a sperm bank for cash to help him get his career going. He resolves to track down his progeny, who would now be about twenty years old, in order to give them some of his wealth to help them mitigate, if required, the effects of Huntington’s. The only problem is that someone else is looking for the very same disparate group of young people but with more sinister intentions.
This set up allows Barclay to spread the action around America, and even France, as well as create a range of characters. There are colourful assassins and the sort of extremely well-connected businessman who seems unbelievable, until you think of the sort of real characters who inveigle themselves into the establishment and parade on our television screen and newspapers daily. As with the other books by Barclay that I have read, the central idea that catalyses his stories is often striking and dramatic but also increasingly implausible as the plot unfolds. Yet, the reader gets carried along by the plausibility of the characters he creates and the emotional authenticity of their relationships as well as his, often, acute skewering of modern fads, fashions and taste. There is a great deal of humour in his books.
There are always great action set pieces in his stories and you can picture them being turned into a movie. However, he doesn’t overdo these set pieces and so they have more impact when they do occur. The readers’ focus and enjoyment comes from the psychological tension he creates, and that is the best recommendation for his work: you want to keep turning the page.
I first was made aware of Barclay when my son-in-law, Rob, lent me a book when I was ill more than ten years ago. The book was "Too Close to Home". I thought the plot was fascinatingly original so when I came across another one I read it too and I was hooked. And then came "No Time for Goodbye", far and away the best thriller I have ever read with the most extraordinary plot idea of a hungover teenager waking up one morning and her father, mother and brother have disappeared and are never found until, years later, clues start appearing. Later, there was the excellent Promise Falls Trilogy. I have to confess I think "Elevator Pitch" is a very weak idea and novel but, with "Find You First", he is back on form.
It's his consistent originality of ideas that make him unique in my experience added to his return to previous characters like Cynthia Bigge and Cal Weaver whose frantic lives are the basis of very striking plotlines.
No other writer in this genre matches him for finding the most extraordinarily unexpected plot developments and I find it incredible that, to my knowledge, none of his books has made it to film or TV.
Dave Smith