Adrian McKinty has a long list of novels and awards to his name, but The Chain (Hachette 2019) has touched a particularly sensitive nerve with crime readers and brought him to international attention. This is a fast-paced, tense, page-turning story with short, sharp chapters, each dated and timed. The narrative is violent, unnerving and every parent’s worst nightmare.
The Chain – a combination of the ransom victim swap scenario and the ominous chain letters of the eighties – is manipulated by unknown criminal masterminds. They choose their victims carefully, and then each victim becomes kidnapper and criminal in turn. The whole system works because of one simple fact: a parent will do anything to save their own child. The Chain continues in an endless, anonymous trail of blackmail and fear.
When Rachel Klein’s daughter Kylie is snatched from a bus stop in broad daylight, Rachel receives a phone call that will change her life: to save Kylie, she must pay a ransom and also kidnap the next victim in The Chain. The caller is a mother herself, whose own son has been abducted by the previous link in The Chain. Rachel, and the other parents involved, soon come to realise that they are capable of actions they would previously have thought impossible and despicable. When faced with the survival of their own child, they will do – literally – anything required of them.
Hard-core crime fans will find this book compulsive reading. The first half is very violent and the threat of harm to small children is chilling and uncomfortable. But I think that’s the point – to what depths would we all be willing to go, in order to save our own child? The second half of the book drills down a bit deeper into the psychological aspects, as Rachel draws on resources she didn’t know she had, and decides to take on The Chain as she attempts to be the one to finally break it. The backstory about other major characters is explored and analysed, and the reader is given some insight into the type of childhood that might spawn such evil and madness.