The Trap by Catherine Ryan Howard
It’s the nightmare scenario that every girl is warned about, and she knows the dangers all too well – but what other choice does she have?
As they drive, she alternates between fear and relief – one moment thinking he is just a good man doing a good thing, the next convinced he’s a monster. But when he delivers her safely to her destination, she realises her fears were unfounded.
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And her heart sinks. Because a monster is what she’s looking for, to discover what happened to her missing sister. She will try again tomorrow night. But will the man who took her sister take the bait?
My Review
Very very clever. There are so many crime novels out there, but this is in a class of its own. It’s so intricately plotted that when I had finished it, I had to go back and re-read some of it. Did it really happen like that? It’s going to be very hard to write about because every passage, every clue, is a spoiler. So this will be a short review.
We open with a young woman walking along a lane in the dark. She’s putting herself in extreme danger – she knows that – but how else can she trap the man who took her sister. How else can she find out what really happened? By using herself as ‘bait’ and hoping he’ll take it.
Women have gone missing and the police are getting nowhere. Operation Tide has been set up to find the women and catch a serial killer. But they are no further forward.
Lucy’s sister Nicki was one of those women. Where is she? No-one seems to care, not to the extent that 17-year-old Jennifer Gold attracted the media’s attention. But then Jennifer was a pretty, perfect, innocent teenager – the poster-girl for a missing persons investigation – while Nicki was drunk and had walked off into the night without even saying goodbye to her friends. She had it coming therefore, didn’t she.
FLO Denise Pope doesn’t agree. Together with Angela from the MPU, they are looking into other disappearances.
There are so many twists and surprises in this book. When you finish reading you’ll think ‘how did I not see that coming?’ because I guarantee you won’t. Smart, perfectly constructed, a masterpiece for our times. And the chapters written from the point of view of the killer are chilling and at times rather graphic.
Many thanks to @annecater for inviting me to be part of #RandomThingsTours
About the Author
Catherine Ryan Howard is an internationally bestselling author from Cork, Ireland. Her work has been shortlisted for the CWA’s John Creasey New Blood and Ian Fleming Steel Dagger awards, and in 2019 her novel The Liar’s Girl was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. The Nothing Man was a no. 1 bestseller in her native Ireland. She currently lives in Dublin, where she divides her time between the desk and the sofa.
