Karen
Author Natalie Barelli's website has a tagline on it that says 'Psychological Thriller Author' and it lists 10 books written by her (another due out in 2026), although FINDERS KEEPERS is the first I've read.
You can definitely see where the psychology comes into this as she's created a couple of main characters that seem to be in desperate need of psychological counselling at the very least. Rose (aka Iris) is a woman with so much baggage she's going to need a large trolley to keep it moving, and Emily is an author who is, it turns out, a disaster to be around.
Starting out with the seemingly passive, profoundly frustrating Rose, walking past a bookshop and spying a book with a title that's chillingly familiar. Turns out Rose's school day's journal, written as a 13 year old with a massive crush on a teacher, was stored on a laptop, which she lost. The journal contains some very dangerous confessions, something that could result in severe consequences for Rose if it were ever to be made public and/or connected to her. So priority number one is getting close enough to Emily to a) find the laptop and b) work out just what Emily knows / is prepared to talk about. So Rose becomes Iris, ingratiating herself close enough to the seemingly unsuspecting Emily, move into Emily's apartment, and slip into the role of unpaid dogsbody unseen and unrecognised. Or so she thinks. The problems are that Rose/Iris isn't who she says she is, and has some very dark secrets indeed and Emily isn't who she says she is, and neither of them are very nice people.
Which leads to a very unusual reading experience where, to be frank, I was gritting my teeth and swearing life was too short for about the first half of the book where horrible people did / said a bunch of tedious things, and I was bored. So very very bored. And then I wasn't. Twists started to appear in the personalities and the plot, people started to drop the pretence and whilst some remained determinedly horrible people, it turned out that maybe not all of them were as bad / useless / self-involved as they seemed. Then a few other characters turned out to be much worse, and the truth started to out itself in some very weird directions.
To my eternal chagrin, I've missed most of Barelli's earlier books. Is the best praise you can have for a book the immediate seeking out of the author's back catalogue? Because that's what happened here, I suspect it will happen for a lot of readers.
Originally posted at www.austcrimefiction.org.
Author Natalie Barelli's website has a tagline on it that says 'Psychological Thriller Author' and it lists 10 books written by her (another due out in 2026), although FINDERS KEEPERS is the first I've read.
You can definitely see where the psychology comes into this as she's created a couple of main characters that seem to be in desperate need of psychological counselling at the very least. Rose (aka Iris) is a woman with so much baggage she's going to need a large trolley to keep it moving, and Emily is an author who is, it turns out, a disaster to be around.
Starting out with the seemingly passive, profoundly frustrating Rose, walking past a bookshop and spying a book with a title that's chillingly familiar. Turns out Rose's school day's journal, written as a 13 year old with a massive crush on a teacher, was stored on a laptop, which she lost. The journal contains some very dangerous confessions, something that could result in severe consequences for Rose if it were ever to be made public and/or connected to her. So priority number one is getting close enough to Emily to a) find the laptop and b) work out just what Emily knows / is prepared to talk about. So Rose becomes Iris, ingratiating herself close enough to the seemingly unsuspecting Emily, move into Emily's apartment, and slip into the role of unpaid dogsbody unseen and unrecognised. Or so she thinks. The problems are that Rose/Iris isn't who she says she is, and has some very dark secrets indeed and Emily isn't who she says she is, and neither of them are very nice people.
Which leads to a very unusual reading experience where, to be frank, I was gritting my teeth and swearing life was too short for about the first half of the book where horrible people did / said a bunch of tedious things, and I was bored. So very very bored. And then I wasn't. Twists started to appear in the personalities and the plot, people started to drop the pretence and whilst some remained determinedly horrible people, it turned out that maybe not all of them were as bad / useless / self-involved as they seemed. Then a few other characters turned out to be much worse, and the truth started to out itself in some very weird directions.
To my eternal chagrin, I've missed most of Barelli's earlier books. Is the best praise you can have for a book the immediate seeking out of the author's back catalogue? Because that's what happened here, I suspect it will happen for a lot of readers.
Originally posted at www.austcrimefiction.org.