Finding Sophie

Critics Review

• Kept me guessing until the very end. A courtroom drama with nice sharp teeth

  Ian Rankin

• Incredible plotting and devastatingly good writing – this book deserves enormous success

  The Secret Barrister

• Finding Sophie is a great thriller as well as a moving look at parental grief . . . I frequently wept while reading it but couldn’t put it down

  Alison Flood, Observer

• [A] forceful, slow-burn narrative . . . handled with Grisham-like assurance

  Financial Times

• A moving yet tense read with a jaw-dropping end

  Woman's Own

• I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough

  Nina Pottell, Prima

• Nuanced, heart-breaking . . . absorbing and genuinely moving — not to be missed

  Daily Mail

• I loved it, so smart and the plot twists blew me away. Imran is the only author writing about a missing person that deals with grief this well

  Gillian McAllister

• The suspense is well maintained throughout … surprising and satisfying… it is a treat to read accounts of a police investigation and court case written by someone who knows how both are conducted

  Literary Review

• A clever, chilling thriller that is also unexpectedly moving

  Shari Lapena

• Finding Sophie is a rare accomplishment. By turns a heart-stopping thriller, a heartfelt mystery, and a powerful study of grief, hope, and the unbreakable bond between parent and child. Brilliant

  Chris Whitaker, author of We Begin at the End

• Compelling

  Crime Monthly

• Wow, what an ending! An intense, desperate, heartfelt and claustrophobic story about the lengths parents will go to for love. Some books have a gut punch at the end. In Finding Sophie you’re emotionally winded, all the way through

  C. L. Taylor

• This thrilling and emotional roller coaster moved me tears with its powerful portrayal of the agonies of parental love and loss. Perfect for fans of Lisa Jewell, Imran Mahmood has excelled himself with this clever, heart-breaking thriller

  Jo Callaghan, author of In the Blink of an Eye

• What an exciting and compulsive read! Two parents with the same goal afraid to tell each other how far they are prepared to go, but they are not the only ones keeping secrets. Imran has surpassed my expectations with an astonishingly twisty tale of despair, deception and desperation

  Liz Nugent, author of Strange Sally Diamond

• Finding Sophie is a Domestic Noir objet d’art. Mahmood’s writing is exceptionally beautiful for a crime genre novel. The tension he manages to weave within such accessible and recognisable human emotions is genuinely extraordinary, and the pacing hits a real punch because you spend the entire book just wanting it all to turn out all right. Brilliant, bated-breath stuff

  Helen Fields, author of The Institution

• Finding Sophie by Imran Mahmood is his best yet. Beautifully written, visceral, evocative and compelling – but with a plot that keeps you guessing to the end. So much more than a legal thriller, this is a work of pure brilliance

  Janice Hallett

• Mahmood’s latest slice of psychological noir examines the dilemma facing a couple whose child has gone missing and who are convinced the culprit lives on their own street. How far will desperate parents go? What boundaries will they cross to uncover the fate of their child? These are the questions tackled by Mahmood in this powerful and beautifully written suspense thriller

  Vaseem Khan

• One of the best and most intelligent thrillers I’ve read in a long while. Written with such skill that you forget you’re reading a novel and just get lost in the story. Gripping, moving, brilliant

  Anna Mazzola

• Another startlingly original story from one of the UK’s finest crime writers. When it comes to legal thrillers with unreliable narrators, Imran Mahmood is pretty much peerless. Unputdownable

  M. W. Craven

• It is heart-stoppingly good, both as a thriller (that final third had me glued to the pages as you delivered the twists like sucker punches) and as a study in family life and parental love. Both Harry and Zara were superbly drawn and the resolution was so satisfying, exactly what this reader needed

  Sarah Hilary

• An absolutely wonderful book. Imran is the absolute master of misdirection, as I’ve learned from his earlier novels, but with Finding Sophie he digs deep into the psychology of grief and loss too. Harry and Zara are such exceptionally drawn characters, their slow unravelling in the wake of Sophie’s disappearance charted with deep skill. The story is both outrageous and utterly believable, the twist in its tail a masterstroke. I enjoyed it immensely, and indeed devoured the second half of it in one long sitting

  James Oswald

• Balancing deeply-drawn parental heartbreak and incomprehension to the extent of obsession, as the couple go to all extremes to resolve the often rebellious Sophie’s absence, the novel treads an assured suspenseful itinerary that never lets go and compels the reader to keep turning the pages. Not far from a perfect read.’

  Crime Time, Maxim Jakubowski