You must kidnap another child to free yours.
The story begins with a masked man and woman abducting 13-year-old Kylie from a bus stop.
Rachel has also received another call her cancer has returned.
Little Brown/Mulholland
And the two people who kidnapped her daughter have also opened fire on a cop.
The weak links are starting to show.
Stephen King says: This nightmarish story is incredibly propulsive and original.
You wont shake it for a long time.
So what happens if you take a good person and force them to do a bad thing?
Is there a core of goodness there that can somehow be retained?
Aristotle would say no but I would argue yes.
It opens with Kylie at the school bus, snatched by a gun-wielding couple.
Tell us about her.
Then we meet her mother, who has to steal another child to free her own.
What kind of woman is Rachel?
Not exactly Liam Neeson inTaken?
Rachel is also a cancer patient.
This is not a book about victims.
Its a book about courage and survival.
What do readers need to know now about the people behind the chain.
Years, decades, centuries?
It is so simple and terrible.
The only way your victims family gets their child back is to do the same.
Its simple, logical and terrifying.
Thats how you become first a victim, then a kidnapper and then an enforcer.
I was in Mexico City researching a different project when I read about the concept of replacement hostage taking.
An exchange is made while the rest of your family take a stab at raise the ransom.
I tied that concept to the idea of chain letters.
Its so easy to succumb to that superstition, isnt it?
Harder to break it.Weallbelieved this.
She destroyed them all in a big bonfire.
She was literally the woman that broke The Chain!
In fact shes still alive in rude good health at the age of 88.
