The Stranger on the Train

Starred review from March 3, 2014
British author Taylor’s taut debut is a heart-stopper. One Sunday evening on a London Underground platform, single mom Emma Turner watches in horror as her one-year-old son, Ritchie, somehow gets on a train that leaves without her. Did someone snatch Ritchie? The police assigned to Emma’s missing person’s case have little sympathy. She has no family, few friends, and no connection with the boy’s father. Dirt poor, she’s overwhelmed by the responsibility of raising a child, the spawn of a quick fling. Worse, in a fit of desperation, she earlier confessed to her GP that she wished Ritchie were dead. So everybody doubts whether the tot was really kidnapped. But when the chips are down, with Ritchie really out of her life, Emma rises to the challenge of saving her son. Beginning with the gasp-inducing first chapter, readers won’t exhale until the end. Agent: Marianne Gunn O’Connor, Marianne Gunn O’Connor Literary Agency.

March 15, 2014
Taylor debuts with a wired-tight psychological thriller dissecting a kidnapping. Single mother Emma Turner is returning home from a London outing when her toddler son, Ritchie, becomes stranded alone in a subway carriage. Emma panics, but Antonia, a beautiful, stylish, 40-ish blonde already seated in the locked car, takes charge. She tells Emma through the closed door to meet her and Ritchie at the next station. Taylor does nail-biting work setting tension at a boil from the story's opening moments, with young toughs loitering on the subway stairs and the ominous noise of the train approaching. Antonia meets Emma to return Ritchie, but Emma is confused by her controlling attitude. Then, while Emma makes a quick trip to the bathroom, Antonia and Ritchie disappear. Characterization is deft: Emma, a mid-20s underemployed university grad who seduced herself into pregnancy; police officers Hill and Lindsay, one a hulking inspector with cold blue eyes who immediately suspects Emma of harming Ritchie, the other a victim-liaison officer who vacillates between suspicion and empathy; and witness Rafe, a young man who resigned from the police force after his probationary year and now decides to help Emma find her son. Telling the story chronologically with flashbacks to Emma's troubled childhood and her ill-starred romance with Ritchie's biological father, Taylor adeptly paints London, contrasting its immensity with its insular pubs and parks. Emma strays toward becoming a one-note character, "defensive...hostile and prickly and angry," but Taylor gradually reveals back story explaining why she's in a "rut of self-pity." Antonia's motive and actions are perfect--and logical in their own mad way--as are the police, trapped by bureaucracy and rigid preconceptions, but Rafe seems a bland hero without flaw. An Alfred Hitchcock-like psychodrama drawn from a mother's nightmare.

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March 15, 2014
Emma Turner is struggling to get home on the London underground with her 13-month-old son, Ritchie, in his buggy, along with shopping bags and a purse, when the train takes off without her. A woman on the same car takes Ritchie in hand, waiting for Emma at the next station and offering further helpuntil she takes off with the child when Emma is in the bathroom. Police, initially sympathetic, become less inclined to believe Emma's claim of kidnapping when they learn what shea distraught, isolated 25-year-old single mothertold her doctor just weeks earlier. Emma's only true ally is Rafe Townsend, a former cop who kept her from injury on the subway platform and uses his contacts to help track down the woman who took Ritchie. Readers may occasionally want to slap Emma, to keep her from behaving against her own best interests, although her background provides some explanation. But this first novel is driven less by character than plot, and the roller-coaster ride, starting with an all-too-plausible incident, is compelling enough to grab and hold interest.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)