Publication: 14th April 2022 – Hodder & Stoughton
THE LAST THING A TWIN EXPECTS IS TO BE ALONE…
Molly lives a quiet, contained life in London. Naturally risk averse, she gains comfort
from security and structure. Every day the same.
Her identical twin Katie is her exact opposite: gregarious and spontaneous. They used to be
inseparable, until Katie moved to New York a year ago. Molly still speaks to her daily without fail.
But when Molly learns that Katie has died suddenly in New York, she is thrown into unfamiliar territory. Katie is part of her DNA. As terrifying as it is, she must go there and fi nd out what happened. As she tracks her twin’s last movements, cracks begin to emerge. Nothing is what it seems. And a web of deceit is closing around her.
Good morning everyone and welcome on my stop for the blog tour of First Born, the incredible new novel by Will Dean.
Molly and Katie are twins, born only a few minutes apart. They have always been together, until Katie moved to New York, leaving Molly behind. Katie and Molly are twins, but they couldn’t be more different. Katie is free-spirited and lively, while Molly lives her life in safety, hyper aware of all the possible dangers around her. There are fire extinguishers in every room in her flat, she makes her own self-defense weapons, and she avoids all situations in which she could be in danger. She’s never taken a plane in her life until she is forced to fly to New York after Katie is found dead in her bedroom. The police is convinced Katie was murdered and Molly, despite her anxieties and fears, starts to dig into her twin’s life, meeting her boyfriend, friends, professors, trying to figure out who would want her sister death. As she does so, she starts to realize that maybe she didn’t know her sister as well as she thought…
I do love Will Dean’s novels because they take you right into the protagonist’s mind and yet it still manages to take you by surprise with the twists and revelations that I certainly didn’t see coming. The story is told in first person from Molly’s point of view so we experience first-hand all her fears, her anxieties, her doubts, her suspicions.
First Born is a psychological thriller with capital letters. The unpredictable and multi-layered protagonist kept me glued to the pages and the plot is very well-written, intense, intriguing, suspenseful, and with a final twist that took me completely by surprise. Highly recommended!!!
A huge thank you to Jenny and Hodder & Stoughton for inviting me to join the blog tour and providing me with a proof of this compelling novel.
Will Dean grew up in the East Midlands and had lived in nine different villages before the age of eighteen. After studying Law at the LSE and working in London, he settled in rural Sweden where he built a house in a boggy clearing at the centre of a vast elk forest, and it’s from this base that he compulsively reads and writes. His debut novel, Dark Pines, was selected for Zoe Ball’s Book Club, shortlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker prize and named a Daily Telegraph Book of the Year. Red Snow was published in January 2019 and won Best Independent Voice at the Amazon Publishing Readers’ Awards, 2019. Black River was shortlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Award in 2021. The Last Thing to Burn was released to widespread acclaim in January 2021.
Book After Book 