[
originally published by the New York Journal of Books
]
“The Chain will
unforgettably haunt you even if you just read the first chapter—so you might as
well lock the doors, bite your nails, and read it all.”
Irish author Adrian McKinty
has built a pair of crime investigation series, as well as a handful of
stand-alones. Always dark with an undertone of grit and desperation, he’s also
seasoned his compelling fiction with a generous twist of wry humor.
But leave the frivolous
behind: The Chain is any parent’s
horror story, spelled out in twisted and lurid detail. The only way to read it
is to be very sure it’s not going to happen to you and yours—but McKinty
doesn’t leave much room for that certainty. It’s tempting to wonder whether
this increasing noir tension results in part from the author’s relocation to
New York City: away from the direct effects of “The Troubles,” and into the
binding net of American urban life and menace.
At the outset of The Chain, divorced mom Rachel O’Neill
learns her young daughter Kylie has been kidnapped—learns it from a disembodied
voice on her phone, followed by a call from the mother who committed the crime.
How can she get her daughter back? Money, yes, but the ransom is the smallest
part of the task: She must kidnap another child, set up the same threat
scenario, keep the “chain” of kidnaps going. Or else her daughter will die. The
mom who’s taken her child prisoner has done so under the same threat, for her
own child. And on it goes.
Most Americans and many Europeans
will have received a “chain letter” at some point. They used to come in the
mail, with the names of a few friends who waited for you to send them a recipe,
or something similar. Their more threatening form arrived with the Internet:
“Send this to five people and get rich; fail to send it, and you’ll have bad
luck, bad karma, horrible results.”
McKinty, in his note at the
end of the book, admits to a fascination from fifth grade with such poisonous
threats. And by melding it to a dreaded Mexican concept of “exchange
kidnapping” and his own twist on terror, he designed this long-term threat—then
set it on Plum Island, a resort section of coastal Massachusetts that can morph
to an ominously barren region in the non-tourist season.
The exhilaration of a crime
ride with McKinty is that he never stay just on the surface. His jabs to the
underworld aren’t just in terms of menacing criminal figures; they reach the
darkness in all of us. Detached now from his Irish setting (he moved to New
York City with family), he pries open how humans react to evil. One moment
Rachel’s the shower, trying fruitlessly to “get clean.” The next, she’s calling
BS on a quote from Camus, “in the depth of winter I finally learned that within
me there lay an invincible summer.” And she confronts her soul:
“All she feels is pain and
misery. Fear above all. And yes, this is the depth of winter all right. This is
the middle of the Ice Age at the sunless North Pole. My daughter has been
kidnapped and to get her back I’m going to have to grab a sweet little boy from
off the street and threaten him and his family and mean it. Mean it when I say
I’m going to kill him because if I don’t I’ll never see Kylie again.”
And of course, if and when
Rachel obeys, she doesn’t know whether she can live with herself afterward. Or
whether her daughter will accept her if she does this.
McKinty’s fierce twists of
narrative and pressure create one highly believable surprise after another, for
a compelling up-to-date twist on crime and threat. The Chain will unforgettably haunt you even if you just read the
first chapter—so you might as well lock the doors, bite your nails, and read it
all.
-->
