It’s an enormous privilege to help begin the blog tour for Imran Mahmood’s new thriller Finding Sophie. My enormous thanks to Tracy Fenton for inviting me to participate in the blog tour and to Raven Books for sending me a copy of the book in return for an honest review.

I am berating myself that I have other books by Imran Mahmood on my TBR pile awaiting reading as I think his writing is brilliant, but you’ll find my review of All I Said Was True here.

Finding Sophie is published by Bloomsbury Raven on 14th March 2024 and is available for pre-order through the publisher links here.

Finding Sophie

Someone is guilty.

For the last seventeen years, Harry and Zara King’s lives have revolved around their only daughter, Sophie. One day, Sophie leaves the house and doesn’t come home. Six weeks later, the police are no closer to finding her than when they started. Harry and Zara have questioned everyone who has ever had any connection to Sophie, to no avail. Except there’s one house on their block—number 210, across the street—whose occupant refuses to break his silence.

Someone knows what happened.

As the question mark over number 210 devolves into obsession, Harry and Zara are forced to examine their own lives. They realize they have grown apart, suffering in separate spheres of grief. And as they try to find their way back to each other, they must face the truth about their daughter: who she was, how she changed, and why she disappeared.

Someone will pay.

Told in the alternating perspectives of Harry and Zara, and in a dual timeline between the weeks after Sophie’s disappearance and a year later in the middle of a murder trial, Imran Mahmood’s taut yet profoundly moving novel explores how differently grief can be experienced even when shared by parents—and how hope triumphs when it springs from the kind of love that knows no bounds.

My Review of Finding Sophie

Sophie is missing.

My goodness Finding Sophie is an affecting book. Intelligently written with an intense and mesmerising style it gradually unfolds so that the reader is drawn into the story of Sophie, Harry and Zara almost against their will. 

It’s quite hard to define the superb quality of Imran Mahmood’s writing. His own barrister experience imbues it with an authority and realism that builds confidence in the reader, but alongside that is a poetic observation of both character and setting, and yet there isn’t an extraneous word here. In addition, the author drops in small pebbles of information that ripple across the surface of the book, leaving the reader wondering just quite what life has been like for Sophie before she vanished. I was frequently taken by surprise. 

The structure of Finding Sophie is equally gripping. Alternate viewpoints from Harry and Zara illustrate the way their desperation to find Sophie both unites and divides them which I found fascinating. Similarly, not immediately knowing the identity of who is telling the first person courtroom scenes is a brilliant hook that kept me totally engaged. Starting in a relatively measured way, the tension in Finding Sophie builds and builds like a piece of mesmerising music so that Imran Mahmood ensnares his reader completely.

Whilst it’s the story of what has happened to Sophie, as well as the courtroom scenes some months later that drives the narrative, and as compelling as they are, it was the character and theme that held my attention most. Through Finding Sophie, Imran Mahmood explores grief that borders on insanity, he looks at the way we might turn to religion or spiritualism and he examines relationships, family, marriage and the way in which we never truly know another person with incredible dexterity. Finding Sophie is a a psychological thriller with many layers, but it is also a spotlight on human nature and the desperate link between guilt and grief that I found utterly fascinating.

Both Zara and Harry elicited strong emotions in me. I felt their loss and their desperation to trace their daughter keenly and yet at times I wanted to shake them and rail at them for their behaviour and their lack of communication. These are multi-layered, flawed and truly tragic people who are so convincingly conveyed that reading about them is almost an intrusion.

I thought Finding Sophie was exceptionally good. It’s a thrilling read, gripping in execution and astounding in the psychology underpinning it. The story might be clearly resolved but I’ve finished Finding Sophie with so many questions about justice, morality, family and relationships that its impact keeps reverberating in my mind. What a brilliant story! 

About Imran Mahmood

Imran Mahmood is a practicing barrister with thirty years’ experience fighting cases in courtrooms across the country. His previous novels have been highly critically acclaimed: You Don’t Know Me was a BBC Radio 2 Book Club choice, Goldsboro Book of the Month and was shortlisted for the Glass Bell Award; both this and I Know What I Saw were longlisted for Theakston Crime Novel of the Year and the CWA Gold Dagger. You Don’t Know Me was also made into a hugely successful BBC1 adaptation in association with Netflix. When not in court or writing novels or screenplays he can sometimes be found on the Red Hot Chilli Writers’ podcast as one of their regular contributors. He hails from Liverpool but now lives in London with his wife and daughters.

You can find out more by following Imran on Twitter/X @imranmahmood777 and finding him on Instagram and Facebook.

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