ONE KICK

Abducted by a child pornography ring when she was 6 and held captive for five years, Kick Lannigan, 21, has turned herself into a lean, mean fighting machine. When a boy named Adam is reported missing, she springs into action to save him.

The first book in a new series by Cain captures the age of the Amber Alert with hard-edged insight. All these years removed from her ordeal, Kick is the most viewed subject on porn sites. Still struggling with psychological baggage, she's dedicated herself to martial arts and marksmanship (she packs a Glock). She also is working at perfecting skills her abductor taught her, including picking locks. When the mysterious John Bishop, a wealthy former gun dealer working with the FBI, drops into Kick's life and demands that she go with him to the site of the latest abduction, she fiercely resists. But she slowly learns to trust him. Except for her tech-geek friend James, with whom she was held captive, she doesn't care about anyone else. Her mother, who wrote a best-seller about her daughter's abduction, is still milking the story as an expert on TV. With Bishop, a taciturn stud with his own painful secrets (and a private plane and helicopter at his disposal), Kick returns to places she was held as "Beth." Her unnerving confrontation with her abductor exposes a horribly complicated relationship. Distinguished by a wealth of details about how child porn rings operate, this is a gripping thriller in which Kick must apply everything she's learned, and things she's forgotten, to survive again.

An unsettling, near-perfect effort by Cain (Let Me Go, 2013, etc.) that leaves you eagerly awaiting the next installment.