THE TRAP

An Irishwoman’s search for the man who took her sister and Lord knows how many other victims takes a series of whiplash turns.

When Nicki O’Sullivan, who hates having been christened Nicola, goes missing from her home in Dundrum, her sister, Lucy, goes into a panic. Although Nicki is not the first woman in the area to vanish and leave her cellphone behind, the Garda Síochána show little interest in finding her until beautiful teenager Jennifer Gold disappears as well, and her activist mother, Margaret, persuades Superintendent Colin Hall to launch Operation Tide to search for them all. Det. Denise Pope, the decorated Garda most active in the search, and Angela Fitzgerald, the civilian employee of the Missing Persons Unit Denise has commandeered into her investigation while Angela awaits her own certification in the Garda, are hopeful that Lena Paczkowski, who seems to have escaped from someplace she calls “the pink house” only to get run down by a tourist’s car, will be able to give them more specific evidence when she awakens from her coma. Learning that Lena actually died in the ambulance minutes after the accident moves the frustrated Lucy, who’s already started a dangerous investigation of her own, to accept an invitation to a television interview arranged by sketchy true-crime writer Jack Keane. That interview doesn’t resolve the case, but it blows it wide open, and everything from that point on feels like a nightmare within a nightmare. Playing freely with time frames and points of view, Howard provides enough monstrous shocks and surprises throughout this distantly fact-based yarn to make you forgive its resolution, which sheds limited light on the mystery but keeps the pot boiling till the end.

Think of a haunted house with lots of trap doors, including doors beneath doors.