Every Last Fear

I had the pleasure of attending a few lectures given by Alex Finlay not too long ago, which ended up sparking my interest in his first novel. He read from the first few pages of this book during the start of one of his sessions, and the entire room sat quiet, enraptured by the story being told. When he finished, one of the attendees cried out “keep going!!”, so “keep going” I did. This book had me flipping pages and reading words as fast as I possibly could.

Matt Pine’s family is dead, his brother in jail, and the whole world knows his name thanks to a Netflix documentary. As he navigates the aftermath of his family’s death, he begins to realize there might be more to their deaths than the accident everyone was led to believe.

As I said above, I couldn’t put this book down, which is why it receives 4/5 stars. Why not the full 5 stars, you might ask…well, I don’t see myself re-reading this one, that’s why. BUT I will continue on with the remaining 2 books Finlay has published and any future novels that he may write.

There were a lot of different plot twists and intricacies woven throughout the story. The book does switch from person to person, third-person narrative to manuscript excerpt from the aforementioned Netflix documentary, and from past to present day. It sounds like a lot – and it is – but Finlay manages to do all of this head hopping and time jumping quite successfully with little-to-no confusion for the reader (very impressive, if I might say).

The chapters were short, consumable in a few minutes if you only have time to read for a short time, which also helped with the pacing of the story. It was easy to fall into the story. The characters were interesting and human – you had your characters you liked and the ones you didn’t, and you know why you feel that way about each of them. You could empathize with the characters easily, and it was heartbreaking to watch Matt go through all of the loops and trials he was forced to overcome.

Unfortunately, I did figure out the ending about 70% of the way through. Admittedly, this is a lot slower than it typically takes for me to figure out a mystery (with the exception of Queen Christie), but I always look for books to shock me at the end!

Overall, highly recommend this novel to anyone looking for an engaging, fast-paced, intricately-woven plot-twist-every-chapter mystery/crime novel.

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