In the author’s note of her new novel, “The Trap,” crime writer Catherine Ryan Howard says the book was inspired by a series of still-unsolved abductions of several young women in Ireland in the 1990s. As a child, Howard became obsessed with made-for-TV true-crime movies, including ones about the Menendez brothers and Amy Fisher, and wondered how people could just disappear without a trace.
“Sometimes – tragically, infuriatingly, inexplicably,” she writes, “fiction is the only place we have to go for answers.”
In “The Trap,” we get three perspectives on a race to catch a faceless killer:
One protagonist is Lucy, a young woman whose sister left to meet friends at a pub in Dublin and never came home. She’s haunted by the disappearance and decides to take matters into her own hands.
The second is Angela, a civilian working as a paper-pusher in the Missing Persons Unit who desperately wants to be a full-fledged member of the Irish police force.
And finally, there’s a nameless man driving through the night. His latest victim is in the back seat, and he says he’s going to tell her everything.
Howard’s cast of characters keeps the plot rolling along, with surprising twists that keep the reader guessing throughout. This is the first Catherine Ryan Howard book I’ve read — or, rather, listened to — and it definitely won’t be my last. Fans of crime fiction will especially enjoy it.
