After being persuaded not to give up writing, Adrian McKinty achieved great success with his last novel, THE CHAIN, success which his writing has always deserved. THE ISLAND should continue to bring him critical plaudits and commercial sales. Not as ‘high concept’ as The Chain, THE ISLAND is a fast-paced, incredibly tense thriller which grabs the reader by the throat and shakes until the heart-pounding ride is over.
American couple Heather and her much older husband, Tom, in Melbourne for his business, travel to an island just off the coast with Tom’s children, Olivia and Owen. There, following a terrible accident, the family is pursued and terrorised by the family to whom the island ‘belongs’. There are shades of Deliverance and Southern Comfort, Wolf Creek, even Mad Max in places, but all done in McKinty’s style which marries spare prose to occasional stream of consciousness sections, something I have loved about his writing going right back to DEAD I WELL MAY BE.
McKinty lived in St Kilda, Melbourne for several years and his knowledge of the area adds verisimilitude to the setting. The story is violent and the suspense almost unbearable, the tension maintained, intensified, right until the conclusion. It is a little difficult for me to predict, as I have loved almost everything that Adrian McKinty has written, but THE ISLAND will, I hope, continue to reach the wider audience that The Chain appealed to. And, just perhaps, some of that readership will go back and discover just how good the Michael Forsythe and Sean Duffy novels are.
