Here and Gone

April 17, 2017
Audra Kinney, the heroine of this suspenseful but deeply disturbing thriller from Beck (the pseudonym of Irish author Stuart Neville), is fleeing from New York to California with her two kids to prevent her abusive ex from getting custody. One minute Audra is submitting to what seems a routine traffic stop in an Arizona backwater, the next she’s in a cell facing charges of marijuana possession with intent to distribute, 10-year-old Sean and six-year-old Louise have disappeared, and Sheriff Ronald Whiteside insists that no children were in the car when he pulled her over. When the story hits the media, the only person who credits Audra’s frantic claims that the last she saw of her kids was Whiteside’s ordering a deputy to drive them away to “somewhere safe” is a stranger, San Francisco gang member Danny “Knife Boy” Lee—because he’s convinced something similar happened to his wife and daughter five years earlier. The narrative drive more than compensates for sometimes inconsistent and less-than-convincing characters, though Audra and her children’s plight may upset some readers. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates.

April 15, 2017
Audra Kinney confronts every parent's worst nightmare when she and her children become the victims of corrupt and scheming cops in the first novel by Beck, a pseudonym for Northern Irish crime writer Stuart Neville (So Say the Fallen, 2016, etc.).After years of abuse, Audra works up the courage to take her two children and leave her husband, but 18 months later, she doesn't have much of a long-term plan. When her friend casually invites her out to San Diego, she packs up the car and heads west. In the middle of the Arizona desert, a small-town sheriff finds an excuse to pull her over, arrest her, and separate her from her children. Soon Audra is headline news, and the cop's story that she wasn't traveling with children, that she must be crazy or even homicidal, becomes the accepted narrative. In San Francisco, however, a young man named Danny Lee hears about what is happening and decides to fly down to Arizona. Several years ago, Danny's wife had a similar experience, and they never found their child--and his wife never recovered. Only Danny and FBI agent Jennifer Mitchell can help Audra uncover the truth behind the sheriff's cruel plan and save her children. The premise is undoubtedly chilling--almost too much so, making it difficult to enjoy the book as "entertainment." The characters, though somewhat interesting, are hard to relate to, and the short, choppy chapters, a common bestseller structure, do little to build suspense. There should have been more to say about the victimization of women by the media, or the horrors of human trafficking, but the moral complexity of the main characters somehow carries little resonance. The villains are too unequivocally evil. In the end, beyond the nerve-wracking premise, there just aren't enough surprises.

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Starred review from April 15, 2017
Good news. Here's the perfect handoff for fans desperate for something like Lee Child, Harlan Coben, and Lisa Gardner. Haylen Beck is the pseudonym of acclaimed Irish crime writer Stuart Neville. In this remarkable piece of suspense, he leaves his top-notch series characters in their Belfast haunts and puts Audra Kinney behind the wheel of an aged station wagon on the run with her two children, desperate to leave an abusive husband and a troubled past in New York. California, here we come! Well, not quite. Audra gets pulled over somewhere in Arizona by one of those unsettling sheriff types and is taken into custody. When she gets to the station, her kids are not there, and she becomes the prime suspect in their disappearance. The collusive deputies claim they never saw any kids. In the ensuing media frenzy, Danny Lee, a Jack Reacherlike figure, recognizes an eerie similarity to events in his own past and is determined that these children be found. It is a desperate fight. How desperate? When Audra, determined not to waste her shot, finally gets the chance, her son has to say, Mom, stop. If there were such a thing as the Misused Mother of the Year Award, this woman with her throat burned raw from screaming would be a prime candidate. Don't be surprised if this one becomes the thriller everybody is reading this summer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)