Thoreau called Plum Island the “bleak Sahara of New England,” but it isn’t that today.
She looks at the box in her hand. The box that contains two possible futures. Two futures that are tumbling toward her at sixty seconds in every minute, sixty minutes in every hour.
One heartbeat at a time.
She smiles.
Either future will be OK.
All futures will be OK.
She has rescued her daughter from the dark.
She has slain the monster.
There are challenges ahead.
A million challenges.
But she has Kylie back.
She has Pete.
She has survived.
Life is fragile, fleeting, and precious.
And to live at all is miracle enough.
Afterword and Acknowledgments
It only takes two facing mirrors to construct a labyrinth.
Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights
I wrote the first draft of The Chain in Mexico City in 2012 after learning about the Mexican concept of exchange kidnappings, whereby a family member offers himself or herself as a replacement hostage for a more vulnerable kidnap victim. I tied that idea to an event from the late 1970s—the era of poisonous chain letters. The part of Ireland I grew up in was very superstitious, and we completely believed in the power of written enchantments. My fifth-grade teacher told the class to bring in any of these letters that were upsetting us, and I gave her a chain letter that was worrying me. She destroyed it along with the others, defying the author’s promises of jinxes, disasters, and bad luck and effectively breaking the chain. This incident deeply impressed me as a kid, and it stayed with me. Periodically over the next three decades, I’d ask my mother how Mrs. Carlisle was doing, and I was always relieved to hear that she was getting through life relatively unscathed.
Back in 2012 I wrote The Chain as a short story, but I thought it had the makings of a novel, so I basically left it unfinished in a drawer for five years. In 2017 I finally got myself a full-time literary agent, Shane Salerno, founder of the Story Factory. I had been writing the Sean Duffy series of detective novels set in the Belfast of my youth, and although these books were getting well reviewed and winning a few awards, they weren’t quite breaking through in the way I wanted. Shane phoned and asked if I had an American book in me, and I pitched him the short-story version of The Chain. I heard something drop and smash in his kitchen, and he urged me to stop whatever I was doing and immediately begin writing The Chain as a novel, which is what I did.
All books are something of a collaborative process, and I’d like to thank Don Winslow, Steve Hamilton, Steve Cavanagh, John McFetridge, and Shane Salerno for looking at early drafts of The Chain and lobbing intelligent suggestions my way.
My actual brilliant editor at Mulholland, Josh Kendall, pored over the manuscript with the keen eyes of a forensic diagnostician. He continually forced me to consider whether an idea or concept was as tight or compelling as it could be. At Mulholland and Little, Brown I would also like to thank the tireless and brilliant Tracy Roe, Pamela Marshall, Katharine Myers, Pamela Brown, Craig Young, Reagan Arthur and Michael Pietsch, and the entire sales team. At Orion I am indebted to Emad Akhtar, Leanne Oliver, Tom Noble, Jen Wilson, Sarah Benton, and Katie Espiner for their blood, sweat, and tears. And at Hachette Australia, special thanks to Vanessa Radnidge, Justin Ratcliffe, and Daniel Pilkington.
I want to thank the staff of the Newburyport Public Library, where I did much of the research for The Chain, and the staff of the George Bruce branch of the New York Public Library in Harlem, who provided me with a quiet space to write. Riding either coincidence or sympathetic magic, while on assignment in Prague for a magazine article on writer’s block, I wrote the final chapters of The Chain in Franz Kafka’s old office (now a hotel) at Na Poříčí 7.
To conclude these acknowledgments I’d like to express my gratitude to Seamus Heaney, Ruth Rendell, Don Winslow, Ian Rankin, Brian Evenson, Val McDermid, and Diana Gabaldon, who have given me encouragement and advice over the years and who told me to just hang in there when I often wondered if I was really cut out for this writing malarkey.
And finally, to my wife, Leah Garrett, always my first and most perceptive reader, and to my daughters, Arwynn and Sophie, for not only providing me with advice on teen mores and vernacular but for teaching me what you are capable of when your kids’ health or happiness is threatened.
Sláinte.
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About the Author
Adrian McKinty was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. He studied philosophy at Oxford University on a full scholarship before immigrating to the United States. He is the author of a dozen crime novels that have won the Edgar Award, Ned Kelly Award, Barry Award, and Anthony Award and have been translated into more than twenty languages. He is a book critic for the Sydney Morning Herald, the Irish Times, and The Guardian. He currently lives in New York City with his wife and two daughters.
Visit his website at adrianmckinty.blogspot.com or follow him on Twitter @adrianmckinty or on Facebook at facebook.com/adrianmckintybooks.
OTHER MYSTERIES AND THRILLERS BY ADRIAN McKINTY
The Michael Forsythe Trilogy
Dead I Well May Be
The Dead Yard
The Bloomsday Dead
The Sean Duffy Series
The Cold Cold Ground
I Hear the Sirens in the Street
In the Morning I’ll Be Gone
Gun Street Girl
Rain Dogs
Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly
Stand-Alones
Hidden River
Fifty Grand
Falling Glass
The Sun Is God
As Editor (with Stuart Neville)
Belfast Noir
The Chain Page 30