Beth is playing Scrabble with her father when the knock on the door comes. He has run drills for her, though, endless drills, "until she could get to the trapdoor in the closet from anywhere in the house in under a minute". She is ready. But her world is shattered, splits in two, when the police come in. "'What's your name, honey?… What's your real name?'… She felt something begin to uncoil inside her and flood her insides with feelings. But the emotions were mixed up, out of order. She tried to push them all away, but they screamed and twisted to get out." Because she's not Beth, and Mel isn't her father. She's Kit Lannigan, kidnapped at the age of six, and, aged 11, she's going home.
Chelsea Cain's 2007 debut, Heartsick, delivered Gretchen Lowell, one of the most sadistic, disturbing and intriguing psychopaths to tread the pages of a thriller in the past decade. Beautiful and deranged, Gretchen exerted a Hannibal Lecter-ish pull over the heart of Archie, the detective she tortured; her return, in a raft of sequels from Cain, shows she held similar sway over readers. The American author's new novel, One Kick, has a very different sort of female lead. Kit, who now goes by Kick, is 21. She has focused, over the 10 years since she was rescued, on making sure nobody will ever take her prisoner again. With a cupboard full of victim reports, detailing the myriad times her image has shown up in child pornography prosecutions – "They were referred to as 'the Beth movies', and there was, incredibly, no way to get them off the internet" – she passes the days listening to police alerts and driving around the scenes of kidnappings in an attempt to save other children from going through what she did.
Estranged from her mother – who has made a living as a "kidnap mom" commenting on her daughter's ordeal – Kick is closest to James, a computer whizz who lives two floors below her and who helps her with her searches. The pair pore over the details of the disappearance of Adam Rice, a little boy who was taken three weeks ago in Tacoma, and Mia Turner, five, abducted by a stranger in a white SUV. They make no headway, until Kit finds a man sitting in her living room, a former weapons dealer turned vigilante named John Bishop who has his own reasons for wanting to save Adam.
Cain never shied away from the gory details in her Gretchen novels – Archie variously has nails hammered into his ribs and is force-fed drain cleaner. Wisely, she takes a different approach in One Kick, leaving her heroine's past cloudy and focusing instead on Kick as a complex, obsessive, troubled 21-year-old, whip-smart, brave and tough.
Sometimes Cain goes a little overboard on the resilience – "Kick didn't need the gun. She knew 571 ways to take someone to the ground with her left hand alone"; "Kick knew four ways to kill someone with a jacket". But Kick is, overall, a credible, substantial new character, her bond with Mel, now dying in prison, unsettling but convincing. Leavened with Cain's pitch-black wit, One Kick, the start of a new series, is a dark, dangerous journey into evil to find the vanished children, and entirely hide-away-until-you-finish-it gripping.
One Kick is published by Simon & Schuster (£7.99). Click here to buy it for £6.39 with free UK p&p
