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First Born by Will Dean

Thriller

First Born

by Will Dean

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Quick take

When her sister turns up dead across the ocean, a young woman is sent on an exhilarating search for answers.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Quirky

    Quirky

  • Illustrated icon, Whodunit

    Whodunit

  • Illustrated icon, Buzzy

    Buzzy

  • Illustrated icon, NYC

    NYC

Synopsis

Sisters. Soulmates. Strangers.

Molly Raven lives a quiet, structured life in London, finding comfort in security and routine. Her identical twin Katie, living in New York, is the exact opposite: outgoing, spontaneous, and adventurous.

But when Molly hears that Katie has died, possibly murdered, she is thrown into unfamiliar territory. As terrifying as it is, she knows she must travel across the ocean and find out what happened. But as she tracks her twin’s final movements, cracks begin to emerge, and she slowly realizes her sister was not who she thought she was and there’s a dangerous web of deceit surrounding the two of them.

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Get an early look from the first pages of First Born.

First Born

ONE

I am half a person.

The darkest half. The half that isn’t quite 50 percent.

It’s time to check my fire alarm, so I stand up on my mattress and press the test button. It bleeps. I test it again because I read on Quora one time—a comment embedded deep inside a thread—that it’s possible to get a false positive.

Sometimes I feel like I am a false positive.

Not sometimes. For at least eighteen of the past twenty-two years. Since I was four years old. That’s when I realized two important things in life. First: there are no such things as identical twins. Second: the universe conspires to trip you up.

I test the alarm one more time and it bleeps.

I lie back down on the bed, and the four baby-safe pillows compress under the weight of my head. Pillows made with air holes. Breathable pillow slips. It’s rare that a full-grown adult woman suffocates from lying facedown in her sleep, but it is not impossible. There was a reported case in South Korea last year.

On my bedside table rests a knife with a three-inch blade. It’s legal because it does not lock and the blade is short, but I made sure to order the toughest knife available. It’s a balance of risks. Being incarcerated, even short-term, even just being questioned by the police, versus the risk of being violently attacked in my own home.

My entire existence is made up of balancing risks. KT, my twin, has never felt the need.

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Why I love it

When I started reading Will Dean’s latest thriller, First Born, it was a dull wintry day in my hometown in New Zealand, and I was hoping to be spirited away someplace more exciting. First Born sure delivered. While Molly Raven is rushing about investigating her identical twin sister Katie’s death, New York City pulsates in the background, so vibrant and alive that it felt like a character in its own right.

But this novel offers so much more than an enthralling setting. The premise gripped me—an identical twin arrives in Manhattan, where Katie has left behind a life more successful than Molly could ever have created for herself. Might she be tempted to step into that life? Identical twins swapping places formed the central theme of my own novel, and I was excited to see how this story would unfold. Molly discovers her sister’s life was not what it seemed and faces the unwelcome realization that Katie was keeping more than one secret. There’s the hot boyfriend who may have been cheating on Katie with her best friend. The creepy guy who lives downstairs. The sleazy college professor. The billionaire patron of her college fund. Everyone is a suspect.

I love putting myself in the hands of a master storyteller who knows how to pull the rug out from under me. As I turned the pages, confronted by one twist after another, I barely had time to draw a breath. Will Dean whips through his story at a breakneck pace, and it’s an exhilarating ride. My advice: Trust nobody, not even the author—least of all the author, who will deceive you in all the best possible ways.

Member ratings (13,969)

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View all
The Boyfriend
The Last One at the Wedding
Sleep Tight
First Lie Wins
House of Glass
Middle of the Night
Listen for the Lie
A Talent for Murder
Beautiful Ugly
Someone in the Attic
One Perfect Couple
Like Mother, Like Daughter
Kill for Me, Kill for You
Bad Tourists
Murder Road
Daughter of Mine
The Fury
The Other Mothers
When I’m Dead
The Soulmate
What Lies in the Woods
She Started It
The Only One Left
Dark Corners
Blacktop Wasteland
All the Dangerous Things
The Only Survivors
The Broken Girls
The Family Game
The Push
We Were Never Here
Things We Do in the Dark
The Golden Couple
The Stranger Upstairs
Gone Tonight
Too Good to Be True
The Last Word
You Are Not Alone
Rock Paper Scissors
Not a Happy Family
A Flicker in the Dark
Reckless Girls
The House Across the Lake
The Last Thing He Told Me
The Maidens
Everything We Didn't Say
The Paris Apartment
You're Invited
The Last Party
Dark Places
Pieces of Her
The Wife Between Us
Sharp Objects
None of This Is True
The Silent Patient
The Other Woman
Necessary People
The Family Upstairs
The Night Swim
Girl A
The Hunting Wives
Just Another Missing Person
First Born
The Lies I Tell
Breathless