What a ride! Find You First is a high-octane, multi-faceted, full-throttle chase: a tech millionaire wants to track down his biological children to give them important health news and part of his fortune, but someone else wants to find them first, kill them, and make any physical trace of them disappear completely. Barclay keeps probably a dozen narrative balls up in the air the entire time. There was so much going on, and so many potential ways the story could go, and the entire time, you just knew it was all going to come together spectacularly in the end.

Barclay did a good job at keeping me off-balance when it came to the mystery. For most of the book, I was sure I knew who the bad guy was, and I was confident that I had a handle on their motivation. The suspect I had in mind wasn’t the obvious baddie, and while their methods were horrible, the motivation I thought they had made them actually kinda sympathetic.

I was wrong. (My suspect turned out to be shady in other ways, so I’m still pretty proud of myself for sussing that out, but they were not behind the killings.) It took me a long time to even begin to suspect the actual bad guy, and their motivation turned out to be messed up far beyond what I ever expected.

Some of the events in the final few scenes did stretch credulity. I can imagine they’d be pretty awesome to watch onscreen, but on the page, they did require quite a bit of suspending disbelief. Still, by that point, I didn’t care how unrealistic some of the logistical details were; I was fully hooked. I started this book sympathetic to Miles (the tech millionaire) and mildly curious about what was going to happen, but by the final 25% or so, I was speed-reading through the e-galley, and felt almost breathless by the time I was done.

It’s such a fun, entertaining read, and the moments between Miles and Chloe, the first child he tracks down, are both funny and heartwarming.

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Thank you to HarperCollins Canada for an e-galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.