Submission 4079

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Author: Natalie Barelli

Published: 2026

Genre: Other Genre

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This book is handpicked by the IBC Editorial Team. If you are an author, publisher, or reader and would like to have a book reviewed by IBC, you may reach us at editorial@indianbookclub.com — we’ll be happy to review it.

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Dear Diary. Today I'm going to kill her. Love, Rose. That opening line tells you almost everything you need to know about the kind of novel Finders Keepers is: propulsive, darkly comic, and entirely unafraid of its own premise. When Rose discovers that a bestselling novel contains the intimate details of her troubled past, details that should have been buried alongside the worst years of her life, she does not go to a lawyer. She goes to work. Inserting herself into author Emily Harper's life as an assistant and devoted fan, Rose begins the careful, increasingly dangerous business of finding out how Emily got hold of her story. What she finds, as long-suppressed memories surface alongside her infiltration of Emily's world, is considerably more complicated and more personal than she anticipated. Sharp, addictive, and built for late-night reading, this is Barelli doing what she does best.

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Rose has a past she has worked very hard to leave behind. Whatever happened during her teenage years, the details of which have been managed into a kind of functional suppression, it was serious enough that discovering it rendered into published fiction, complete with details no one should have access to, constitutes an immediate crisis. The book, Diary of an Octopus by Emily Harper, is a bestseller. Emily is making the rounds, accepting the praise, describing the work as fiction. Rose knows it is not fiction. Rose knows because she lived it. The central question how did Emily get this information? drives Rose into action. A stolen laptop appears to be the mechanism: the most intimate details of her life, documented somewhere digital and now, apparently, in someone else's hands. To recover it, to understand what has been taken and how much damage has been done, Rose needs access. She engineers it by becoming the one thing Emily cannot resist: her biggest fan, her most eager assistant, her most devoted admirer. What follows is the specific, darkly enjoyable tension of an infiltration story told from the inside of the performance of adoration alongside the growing desperation of the actual mission, complicated by Rose's own past surfacing in fragments as her proximity to Emily brings suppressed memories into focus. The memories, when they arrive, reframe everything Rose thought she understood about what happened to her, and the novel's final act turns on revelations that the carefully constructed suspense has been building toward with considerable craft.

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“Ownership of One's Own Story”: The central violation at the heart of Finders Keepers, having the most private, most painful chapters of your life transformed into someone else's published narrative without your knowledge or consent, resonates well beyond its thriller application. Barelli is writing, at its most fundamental level, about who owns a story: the person who lived it or the person who found it and decided to tell it. Rose's outrage is entirely proportionate to the theft, and the novel's emotional logic depends on the reader feeling the full weight of what has been taken from her, not just privacy but agency, the ability to decide what her own past means and to whom it belongs. “Trust, Betrayal, and the People Closest to Us”: The novel's most significant reveal that the route to Rose's secrets runs through someone she trusted is handled as both thriller mechanics and a genuine emotional reckoning. Barelli is interested in the specific devastation of betrayal by intimacy: the way the people who know us most completely are the people most capable of weaponising that knowledge. The memories that surface as Rose gets closer to the truth are not simply plot exposition. They are the restoration of information that was taken from Rose in more than one way, and the novel treats the emotional dimension of that restoration with care alongside the plot dimension. “Performance and the False Self”: Rose's infiltration of Emily's life requires a sustained performance: the adoring fan, the capable assistant, the person who has no stake in anything beyond professional admiration. Barelli writes the maintenance of this performance with the specific tension of a thriller that understands how exhausting it is to manage a false self in proximity to danger. The irony that Rose is performing a version of herself while investigating someone who has performed a version of Rose gives the novel a mirroring quality that adds depth to what might otherwise be a purely mechanical suspense plot. “Memory, Suppression, and the Past's Insistence on Return”: Rose has suppressed her teenage years not through casual forgetting but through the kind of active, sustained management of painful material that requires ongoing effort. The novel is interested in what happens when that management is disrupted when circumstances force the suppressed material back to the surface, and it uses Rose's infiltration of Emily's world as the mechanism of that disruption. The memories that return are not simply backstory. They are the psychological core of the novel, and the process of their return is handled with enough attention to make the eventual revelations feel earned rather than convenient. “The Ethics of Artistic Appropriation”: Beneath the thriller plot is a question that contemporary publishing has made increasingly urgent: what is the relationship between lived experience and fiction, and what obligations does a writer have toward the people whose lives provide the material? Emily's claim that the novel is fiction does not hold up to Rose's knowledge of its actual provenance, and the novel does not let that claim stand unchallenged. Barelli is not writing a treatise, but the question of what Emily did and whether the fiction label exonerates her is genuinely present throughout.

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The Opening Diary Entry. Dear Diary. Today I'm going to kill her. Love, Rose. This is the novel in miniature: the dark subject matter, the matter-of-fact tone, the self-aware dark humour that signals exactly what kind of reading experience is being offered. The opening announces itself with confidence, and it delivers on its promise. The voice established in that single entry is sustained throughout, giving Finders Keepers a tonal consistency that makes it easy to inhabit. Rose's Infiltration of Emily's Life. The mechanics of Rose's insertion into Emily's world, the performance of fandom, the gradual increase in access, and the sustained management of two entirely incompatible versions of herself are the novel's most purely entertaining passages. Barelli understands that the infiltration thriller's specific pleasure is the tension between what the protagonist is actually doing and what they are performing, and she maximises that tension by making Emily's personality a genuine challenge to endure. The dynamic between Rose's private assessment of Emily and her performed adoration is one of the novel's most consistently entertaining threads. Emily as Antagonist Emily's character, the sweetness that functions as both social performance and genuine personality trait, the obliviousness to what she has done that coexists with the apparent calculation required to have done it, is the novel's most provocative construction. She is not a simple villain, which makes her both harder to dismiss and more interesting to watch. The reader's relationship to her shifts across the novel as more information becomes available, and Barelli manages this shift with enough craft to make the recalibration feel earned. The Final Act Revelations. The novel's closing revelations, the explanation of how Emily accessed Rose's story and what the full truth of Rose's past actually is, are handled with the efficiency of a writer who has been carefully managing information distribution throughout. The twists land because the groundwork was laid without being obvious, and the satisfaction of the ending is proportionate to the investment the novel has accumulated in Rose's mission and her memories. The conclusion offers the specific pleasure of a thriller that has played fair with its reader.

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Finders Keepers has a well-defined readership and delivers its pleasures with reliable confidence. If you love compulsive, fast-paced psychological thrillers built on a propulsive premise and short chapters designed for sustained, addictive reading, Barelli is one of the more consistent providers of this experience in the genre. The novel moves efficiently, the chapter endings generate the momentum that makes putting it down difficult, and the central premise provides enough genuine tension to sustain the pace across its full length. If you enjoy infiltration narratives where the protagonist must maintain a false identity in proximity to the person they are investigating, the specific pleasures of this structure are deployed here with evident enjoyment. The dynamic between Rose and Emily is the novel's best sustained tension, and readers who respond to the claustrophobic intimacy of an undercover story will find it engaging throughout. If you appreciate thrillers with genuine emotional stakes beneath the mechanics where the plot mystery is also a personal reckoning, where the answers the protagonist is seeking involve as much self-knowledge as external revelation, Finders Keepers offers more depth than its breezy pacing might initially suggest. Rose's recovering memories are the novel's emotional foundation, and the eventual understanding of what was done to her and by whom gives the thriller resolution a personal weight that lingers. A candid note: the novel's middle section loses some momentum, and the cast of supporting characters is large enough that some readers may find the tracking of relationships and names requires occasional recalibration. These are manageable challenges rather than structural failures, and the novel's final act rewards the reader's patience with the kind of satisfying, fairly earned resolution that the thriller genre promises and does not always deliver. For readers who want a well-constructed, confidently written, genuinely entertaining thriller with a premise that hooks immediately and a conclusion that pays off cleanly, Finders Keepers delivers exactly what it promises.

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This review is part of the Indian Book Club’s editorial initiative to spotlight books that inspire, inform, and leave a lasting impact on readers. Every title featured is carefully handpicked and reviewed by the IBC Editorial Team to maintain quality, authenticity, and literary value. If you are an author, publisher, or reader and would like to submit a book for review, we’d be delighted to hear from you. Please write to us at: editorial@indianbookclub.com Our team personally evaluates each submission, and selected books are featured as official IBC Editorial Reviews on our platform.