I am delighted to be taking part in the blog tour for Emma Curtis’s second novel When I Find You today. So, here is the blurb before I share my thoughts.

The Blurb

What do you do when someone takes advantage of your greatest weakness?
The brilliant new thriller from the author of ONE LITTLE MISTAKE
Perfect for fans of Clare Mackintosh, C L Taylor and Claire Douglas

When Laura wakes up the morning after her office Christmas party and sees a man’s shirt on the floor, she is horrifed. This is no ordinary one-night-stand.
Laura suffers from prospagnosia – severe faceblindness – a condition that means she is completely unable to identify and remember faces. The man she spent all night dancing with and kissing, the man she thought she’d brought home, was identifiable only as ‘Pink Shirt’.
But the shirt on her bedroom floor is blue.
And now Laura must go to work every day, and face the man who took advantage of her condition. The man she has no way of recognising.
She doesn’t know who he is, but she’ll make him pay.

My Thoughts

After enjoying Emma Curtis’s debut novel One Little Mistake I eagerly anticipated her second book and was thrilled to be able to get an advance copy of When I Find You.

Twenty-eight-year-old Laura Maguire suffers from prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, which impacts on the way her brain receives information. Laura cannot recognise faces at all – not even her own – and it is a condition that she has lived with all her life. She has managed to live with her condition and has a successful career as a designer in advertising. However, things begin to unravel when following a boozy staff night out she wakes up with a man … but it is not the man she believed she had spent the night with as this one is wearing a different coloured shirt. As the shock settles in, Laura becomes determined to find out who took advantage of her.

This is an interesting theme that really made me think. While Laura willingly participated in the sexual intercourse, the fact that she cannot recognise faces and subsequently discovers that she has slept with a different man to the one she had intended to be with is an unnerving concept. Add to it the fact that nobody knows about her face-blindness apart from one of her managers – who is female – and the tale becomes even more creepy. Somebody has clearly found out and taken advantage of her, in fact they have raped her. Curtis’s exploration of Laura’s feelings around this and the dilemma she faces as to whether she could go to the police or not is really well done.

Curtis writes really well about Laura’s experiences of living with prosopagnosia and I really got into her skin. Written in first person narrative there are some exceptional passages that really describe and convey the feelings and emotions Laura goes through on a daily basis as a result of her condition. At times I felt the confusion Laura felt when coming in to contact with different characters she knows but cannot recognise, and Curtis really demonstratess how disconcerting this would be. Curtis has clearly carefully researched prosopagnosia.

When I Find You is a bit of a slow burner as it follows Laura in her quest to find her abuser, and also her manager Rebecca who has issues of her own to contend with. If you are after fast spills and thrills When I Find You may not be for you, but if you like your thrillers to be more chilling and unnerving it will be a great addition to your bookshelf. I loved its subtlety, its concentration on emotions and its intensity. The pace does increase greatly towards the end as it reaches its final crescendo. A crescendo that left me open-mouthed and wide-eyed.

Undoubtedly a disturbing thriller, When I Find You is also a story about how appearances do not give the full picture of what a person is capable of … you can never tell from the outside what is going on in the inside. A great read that is well written.

Published on ebook on 1 July 2018 by Transworld Digital and paperback on 9 August 2018 by Black Swan. Get your copy HERE.

About the Author

EMMA CURTIS was born in Brighton and brought up in London. She is a member of ‘The Prime Writers’, a collective of writers who have all had their first books published after the age of 40.
Emma has two children and lives in Richmond with her husband.
@emmacurtis #WhenIFindYou

A huge thank you to Emma Curtis, Black Swan and Netgalley for the advance copy and to Anne Cater for inviting me to take part in the blog tour.