The Island
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3.6 • 26 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Propulsive, terrifying, and blade-sharp, The Island is the next thrilling adventure from the mastermind behind the award-winning global sensation The Chain, and a family story unlike any you've read yet.
You should not have come to the island.
You should not have been speeding.
You should not have tried to hide the body.
You should not have told your children that you could keep them safe.
No one can run forever . . .
'a breathless and confronting ride' Sydney Morning Herald
'a tense, pacy page-turner' The Guardian
'Sure to please readers who love pacy, suspenseful survivalist adventures' Weekend Australia
'The Island certainly gets the blood pumping and the pages turning as it races to its dramatic conclusion' Canberra Weekly
'The tension is palpable. The plot is twisted and claustrophobic. McKinty snatches you early and doesn't let you escape until the very last page' Good Reading
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Adrian McKinty, author of the wildly popular The Chain, returns with another terrifying thriller. While on a family getaway to Australia, widowed doctor Tom Baxter and his new wife, Heather, hope to get some much-needed bonding time with Tom’s kids, Olivia and Owen. But curiosity turns their fun adventure into a deadly nightmare when they visit the remote Dutch Island, where they’re pitted against a brutal, lawless family that’s been living there in isolation. McKinty escalates the Baxters’ ordeal at an unfathomable pace, turning a seemingly hopeless situation into a Die Hard–style fight for survival in the Australian wilderness. A good old-fashioned white-knuckle action adventure, The Island will make a great movie.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Deliverance meets The Road Warrior in this harrowing survival thriller set in Australia from bestseller McKinty (The Chain). Heather, a 24-year-old Seattle massage therapist, has recently married surgeon Tom Baxter, a widower who's 20 years her senior. She's also taken on the responsibility of caring for Tom's children, 14-year-old Olivia and 12-year-old Owen. Olivia and Owen view Heather as "too young to be a real mom," and Heather agrees. When Tom is invited to give the keynote speech at a medical conference in Melbourne, he packs up the family, saying they can make a mini vacation of the trip. Given the incessant demands of the kids to see koalas and kangaroos, Tom agrees to pay an exorbitant sum to take a ferry to a small private island, which turns out to be the home of the unsavory O'Neil family. A penknife Heather received as a gift from an Aboriginal man on the mainland comes in handy after an accidental road death leads the vengeful O'Neils to target the Baxters. How Heather and the children wind up pooling their abilities to stay alive against all odds makes for an exhilarating ride. McKinty is a master of suspense.
Customer Reviews
Disappointing
1.5 stars
Author
Irish. Did law at the University of Warwick , then politics and philosophy at Oxford. Moved to the US in the early 1990s, taught high school English and began writing fiction. Published a series of novels set during “the troubles” in his native Northern Island that featured Sean Duffy, a Catholic detective working for the Royal Uslter Constabulary. Mr McK won heaps of awards and received many nominations for others, but quit writing in 2017 because his novels weren’t selling well enough and he couldn’t support his family. American author Don Winslow referred Mr McK to his agent, who loaned him moeny while he wrote The Chain (2019), a standalone thriller set in the US that landed a six-figure book deal plus film options. The rest, as they say…
Plot
Twenty-something female massage therapist from Seattle, Washington treats recently bereaved, mid-forties orthopaedic surgeon so well than he marries her, which involves becoming stepmother to two “difficult” teenagers: a 14-year-old OCD girl on Lexapro and a 12-year-old ADHD boy on Ritalin. Your typical American upper middle class family, in other words. The surgeon is invited to give the keynote speech at a conference in Melbourne, Australia. The kids want to go. They make a holiday of it. First stop: the Red Centre. Next is Melbourne for the conference. The organisers put them up in a luxury bayside AirBnB. The kids behave like little sh*ts. The old man’s a tad self obsessed. They get a hire car and head down the Mornington Peninsula in search of native fauna to look at, but don’t think to google fauna reserves. A dodgy guy and his dodgy mate show them a koala in cage in the back of their truck and tell them there’s plenty more on their family’s private island a mile or so off the coast. They can’t come over though because Ma, the leader of the clan, won’t like it. US orthopod comes up with enough cash to change their minds. Big mistake. Following an untimely accident in the Porsche Cayman hire car, the four of them are taken prisoner by homicidal hillbillies. Think Mad Max meets Duck Dynasty. Things go downhill from there, metaphorically speaking, or possibly anthill given that unsuspecting Dutch tourists get staked to the ground over them. (That’s how things roll in Victoria with Chairman Dan in charge). No more spoiler alerts except to say the massage therapist turns out to be feistier than anyone expected.
Prose
High paced thriller prose that’s shot through with plot holes wide enough to…For instance, it’s over 100 degrees. The water is cold in the day time and warm at night. Go figure. Maybe that’s why sharks nudge them at the shoreline when they’re trying to hide among rocks.
Characters
Fuggeaboutit
Bottom line
I am a big fan of the Sean Duffy novels. The Chain, not so much. This was so awful I could barely finish it. Others clearly disagree (3.92 on Goodreads). It’ll probably end up on Netflix or Prime.
Footnote
According to Wikipedia, Mr McK has a new Sean Duffy title in the works. I live in hope.
The Island
A reasonable read, but a bit far fetched. Hard to believe that an American tourist family could hide and outwit a large , heavily armed group of crazy Australians. Especially on a tiny island (4 miles by 2 miles), on which the Australians have lived most of their lives. Also hard to believe that gun fire, diesel / petrol explosions and fire would not be heard / observed on the mainland only 2 miles away. Finally, a pretty poor ending indicating that the Victorian Police and Authorities appear to have allowed multiple murders to have been committed without further criminal investigation and subsequent repercussions.