A young woman, stranded on the side of the road in the middle of the night receives an offer of help from a passing driver. It’s the thing you are told never to do – never get into a stranger’s car. But she gets in anyway, and her worst fears quickly come to fruition – the driver is a perfectly normal person trying to do someone in need a favour. But Lucy wasn’t looking for a good man.

She was looking for a monster.

And she’ll try again tomorrow…

Well, that was the wrong book to finish just before going to bed. Took a good while to get to sleep…

If there was an award for “Never Writes The Same Book Twice”, it should definitely go to Catherine Ryan Howard. She’s written twisty thrillers of all shapes and sizes – Distress Signals, The Liar’s Girl, Rewind, The Nothing Man, 56 Days and Run Time – all of them extremely satisfying tales and all completely different structurally. And once again, with The Trap, she has produced an excellent thriller that will completely get under your skin.

Told from multiple points-of-view – Lucy, the sister of one of the missing women, Angela, a would-be member of the Gardai and the villain of the piece as well – the tension builds nicely while tackling some of the rather depressing realities of such crimes, such as the press only really taking notice when a photogenic and sympathetic victim is taken. Inspired by a number of unsolved crimes – although a work of original fiction – there are many bits and pieces here that made me think, while coming to some fairly depressing conclusions (in a good way).

The premise and title only give an inkling of the direction that the story takes. I should say for my readers that this isn’t a mystery novel – it’s a thriller that verges on non-supernatural horror in places – but it twists and turns all of the place with a number of genuine surprises.

I should mention one thing – the killer’s voice. Normally, I absolutely hate that stuff. I forget (thankfully) what the book was that I read a while back where the killer’s voice slowly revealed every unpleasant predilection under the sun that he suffered from. Here, the voice is chilling – absolutely chilling – without resorting to any detail whatsoever. It’s masterfully done.

So another recommendation for Catherine’s book. No surprise, really – if you haven’t tried her books yet, I strongly recommend that you do.

The Trap is published by Transworld in ebook on August 3^rd and in hardcover on August 17^th. Many thanks to the publisher for the review e-copy via NetGalley.