Review: The First Girl by Claire McGowan

The First Girl by Claire McGowan

Blurb from Goodreads:

She believed her serial-killer ex was innocent, but now history is repeating itself. What does she really remember?

Writer Karen Walker knows more than most about murderers. Her first love went on to become The Bagman, a notorious serial killer now locked away for life in a maximum-security prison.

Karen has spent her life running from the weight of having loved him, defended him and, ultimately, leading the police to his door. But now, ten years later, just as she’s about to publish her account of his crimes, a young woman is abducted in horribly familiar circumstances.

It can’t be The Bagman…can it? He’s safely behind bars, thanks to her. But she has to know for sure.

Returning to the hometown she thought she’d left for good, Karen is drawn into a deadly game of cat and mouse with the man she’s never escaped. If there’s any chance of saving the kidnapped girl, she’ll have to face up to what really happened back then, once and for all…

My Review:

I really liked this book and wasn't sure if Karen was an unreliable narrator or not.  That is to say -- this book kept me guessing about what really happened in the past and also how the book would end.  I was surprised in a good way.  It was thrilling but not over the top.  This reminded me a bit of the Archie Sheridan and Gretchen Lowell series so if you like that series, definitely this a try!

The First Girl comes out next week on Febuary 18, 2025, and you can purchase HERE!  

The first time I ever laid eyes on Aaron Hughes, I had a sense that he would change the course of my life. A shiver along the spine, a hint of the horror to come, as rain ran down the windows of the prefab classroom on a wet Tuesday in September. I knew at once things would never be the same again. I just didn't know how.

These are the first lines of the book I wrote about you, your crimes, and how I helped to send you to prison for them. It's a good enough opening, if a little cheesy, but it isn't true. Of course I didn't think anything like that. Does it ever happen in real life, that sort of premonition, such a foreshadowing of doom? It didn't for me. The first time I saw you, you walked into double maths in my school in a small town near Doncaster, in the north of England, and I thought very little of it.