THE CHAIN
Your phone rings. A stranger has taken your child. To bring them home, you must take someone else's. And when you do, those parents must take another child. Break the pattern at any point, and yours dies. It's a premise so wickedly simple you'll wonder why no one thought of it sooner, and so morally suffocating you'll feel it pressing down on you from the first page. Adrian McKinty has built something genuinely unsettling here, a thriller that traps you inside an impossible ethical spiral and refuses to let you climb out. Ian Rankin calls it 'scary, plausible, gripping', and that economy of praise lands harder than a paragraph of breathless gushing. Val McDermid warns you'll miss meals and bus stops. Stephen King says you won't shake it for a long time. These aren't empty endorsements thrown at a publicist's request. They read like honest warnings. Dennis Lehane went with 'diabolical, unnerving, relentless', which is arguably the most accurate three-word summary on offer. Tana French suggests it should be savoured, which feels almost paradoxical given how fast the pages turn. What makes the book stick is its central conceit: ordinary people, ground down by terror and love, doing unthinkable things to protect their own. It does for parenthood, as one reviewer puts it, what Gone Girl did for marriage. Named a thriller of the year by the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Observer, Time Magazine, and Amazon, this one arrives carrying serious weight. Pick it up with a clear afternoon ahead of you. You won't be doing much else.
- Author: Adrian McKinty
- Publisher: Orion
- Genre: Horror
- ISBN: 978-1409189602
- Pages: 416 pages