#Review: I Found You by Lisa Jewell

I Found You

Author: Lisa Jewell

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Genre/Themes: Fiction, Thriller, Mystery

Release Date: April 25th 2017

Page Count: 352

Format: ARC

ISBN: 9781501154591

*Disclaimer: An ARC of I Found You by Lisa Jewell was provided to me by Simon & Schuster Canada in exchange for an honest review. This does not effect my opinion in any way.

I’m always a little hesitant when I start reading a new thriller. This is one of my all-time favourite genres and it has become really hard to find unique and unpredictable stories that are also written well. I read The Girls In The Garden by Lisa Jewell last year and while I liked it, it didn’t blow me away. Well, it was completely different this time around! I Found You was everything that I needed from a psychological thriller.

Synopsis

A young bride, a lonely single mother, and an amnesiac man of dubious origin lie at the heart of New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jewell’s next suspenseful drama that will appeal to fans of Liane Moriarty and Paula Hawkins. In a windswept British seaside town, single mom Alice Lake finds a man sitting on the beach outside her house. He has no name, no jacket, and no idea how he got there. Against her better judgment, she invites him inside. Meanwhile, in a suburb of London, twenty-one-year-old Lily Monrose has only been married for three weeks. When her new husband fails to come home from work one night she is left stranded in a new country where she knows no one. Then the police tell her that her husband never existed. Twenty-three years earlier, Gray and Kirsty are teenagers on a summer holiday with their parents. Their annual trip to the quaint seaside town is passing by uneventfully, until an enigmatic young man starts paying extra attention to Kirsty. Something about him makes Gray uncomfortable—and it’s not just that he’s playing the role of protective older brother.

What I Liked

The pace. This book moved so quickly for me and I LOVED that. Especially when it comes to thrillers and my constant need for answers, a fast paced book is always fantastic! I Found You was an instant page-turner and I literally could not put it down as it always felt as though the answer I wanted was right around the corner!

The characters. It’s really hard to find characters within a thriller that are likable. They’re usually unreliable and terrible people if I’m being quite honest. While the characters within I Found You each have their own flaws, there was still something about most of them that made me really like them and enjoy reading about them.

The multiple perspectives/timelines. One of my favourite things in a novel is when it contains multiple perspectives. I love knowing what many characters are thinking within the same scenario. Mix that in with a multiple timelines and I’m sold. I love books that jump from the past to the present, ESPECIALLY within the thriller/mystery genre. The multiple perspectives and timelines within I Found You were executed perfectly and they provided a perfect opportunity to reveal more and more answers as each chapter came to an end.

The suspense. I mean, it wouldn’t be great thriller without fantastic suspense, am I right? As mentioned above, the pace of this novel was fantastic and it perfectly unravelled the mystery behind the characters and how everyone was connected. I was constantly at the edge of my seat the entire time.

What I Didn’t Like

The twist? I add a question mark to the end of this statement because I’m not sure that I didn’t like it per se. The twist was predictable for me, I figured out the identity of the man with no memory pretty early on in the novel. However, I didn’t necessarily dislike that I knew. It was more that I was expecting something else to happen that would be even more shocking and it never really did. Even though I knew his identity, it was cool to see the story unravel further for the reader to understand how he got to that point.

Overall, I Found You was an amazing thriller and exactly what I was hoping for! I absolutely loved this book and I will definitely be recommending it to everyone I know who loves thrillers and mysteries. I can’t wait to read what Lisa Jewell comes out with next!

About The Author

Lisa was born in London in 1968. Her mother was a secretary and her father was a textile agent and she was brought up in the northernmost reaches of London with her two younger sisters. She was educated at a Catholic girls’ Grammar school in Finchley. After leaving school at sixteen she spent two years at Barnet College doing an arts foundation course and then two years at Epsom School of Art & Design studying Fashion Illustration and Communication. She worked for the fashion chain Warehouse for three years as a PR assistant and then for Thomas Pink, the Jermyn Street shirt company for four years as a receptionist and PA. She started her first novel, Ralph’s Party, for a bet in 1996. She finished it in 1997 and it was published by Penguin books in May 1998. It went on to become the best-selling debut novel of that year. She has since written a further nine novels, as is currently at work on her eleventh. She now lives in an innermost part of north London with her husband Jascha, an IT consultant, her daughters, Amelie and Evie and her silver tabbies, Jack and Milly.