Review By Kayleigh

The Kidnapping of Alice Ingold is a timely thriller focused on the digital age.

Favourite Quote:

Alice’s video tells me only two things: There’s more than one kidnaper and they’re worse than I feared. “These people,” as she’d said, are not criminals out for a quick payday. Her captors fancy themselves the new Zodiac Killers.

I pocket my phone and rush into the kitchen. My keys sit on the table along with my purse. I grab them both, determined to get to Brian. He might be too important to sleep at home during the week, but if anyone can solve this puzzle, it’s him. This is his daughter. He owes her. After all these years of subordinating my wants and needs for his careers, he owes me.

Book Synopsis:

Alice Ingold has been kidnapped. Call the police. Alert the media. You can’t play this game without all the pieces.

Beautiful, blond, and immensely privileged, Alice Ingold is the perfect victim for a true-crime obsessed culture—and for a masked duo with a singular purpose. Instead of a demand for ransom, her captors have a riddle, and they’re inviting the entire country to solve it.

No one is more invested in the search than Alice’s Catherine, a socialite with obscene generational wealth, and Brian, a visionary AI tech guru. But while Brian turns to machines to solve the problem, Catherine tries to crowdsource the solution, stopping at nothing to bring her daughter home. And America isn’t just watching the story unfold…it’s playing along. The nationwide scavenger hunt for Alice is on.

As an increasingly desperate Catherine strives to understand each new clue, a complex picture of the crime develops. Soon, everyone will see the kidnapping of Alice Ingold for what it is—and Alice won’t be the only one who will need saving.

Review:

I wanted to love this book, and the first half really pulled me into Alice, her mom Catherine and the race to find Alice. This is a terrific cast of terrible, privileged and powerful people. Alice is a young idealist, born into generational wealth on her mother’s side and new money from her genius tech father who’s goal is to change and save the world with his AI company. 

Alice wants to make the world a better place and wants to earn her place in the world. We discover a lot about her from diary entries that are written after she’s kidnapped from her new apartment in a sketchy part of town. Her mother, Catherine, had just been there for lunch and witnessed part of the kidnapping. The novel skips between Alice’s diary entries that focus on her past, her kidnappers and her situation. Catherine’s chapters are in the now and focus on the tension between her and her workaholic husband, the kidnappers demands, and the police working to find Alice. The demands are riddles that will help Catherine uncover the truth of where Alice is, and the kidnappers demand that she make the riddles public to get the world involved.

Brian, Alice’s dad, features heavily in the story, as does his work. Brian and Alice are set firmly on the opposite sides of the AI debate that is happening in our real world as well. I was really hooked into the story until the AI debate became very slanted to the dangers of AI (yes, I totally agree!) and then became pontific and overtook the narrative of the story.  

There’s a plot twist 3/4s of the way through that I enjoyed even though, through the heavy focus on the AI plot, wasn’t as much of a surprise as I feel it could have been.  I found the ending, though, to be satisfying. 

I liked most of the book and will certainly read more by the author. 

Thank you to Thomas & Mercer for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.