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.
Finders Keepers
"You’re not going to murder me in the night, are you?" Emily asks.
"Haha. That’s funny," I say.
Of course, I’m not going to murder her in the night. I need my laptop back first. That’s the whole point of making friends with Emily Harper, author of the hugely successful novel Diary of an Octopus . So I could get inside her apartment and take back what’s mine.
Emily doesn’t know who I really am. She thinks I’m her biggest fan, her new best friend who happens to need a place to stay for a few days. She doesn’t realize the laptop she found—and took—from a busy airport almost two years ago was mine.
I didn’t care about the laptop, just what was on it.
My diary.
The one I kept many years ago as a troubled thirteen-year-old girl with a vivid imagination and a flair for the dramatic. The diary Emily Harper has now published as her own.
She thinks it's a story about a schoolgirl’s crush on her teacher, but she’s wrong. It’s a story about a murder. Two murders, if you count the hamster.
She thought it was okay to make a few changes and publish it under her own name, but she was wrong about that, too.
Because sometimes, truth is deadlier than fiction.
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