Caller Unknown: A Novel ― A Gripping Suspense Story

A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY • "An unputdownable adventure that was both heartwarming and thrilling! Everything I've come to expect from Gillian McAllister!" —Freida McFadden, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author
How far would you go to rescue your child? A mother races against the clock—and finds herself on the wrong side of the law—in a desperate fight to save her teenage daughter in this pulse-pounding thriller from the author of Reese’s Book Club Pick and New York Times bestseller Wrong Place Wrong Time.
There is nothing that Simone won’t do for her daughter, Lucy. The two have always been close, and with Lucy about to leave home for university, they depart the UK for a vacation to Texas to spend some quality time together. But when Simone awakens on their first morning in the desert, Lucy is gone, missing from their rental cabin. In her place is a cell phone, and a voice on the other line issues a shocking ransom demand. Don’t tell the police. Come to this location. And be prepared to do a deal…
Though Simone’s husband urges her to bring in the authorities for help, she knows she can’t take any chances. The kidnappers might kill Lucy if she tells anyone. No mother would take that risk. Instead, that night, she drives to the isolated meet-up.
What she finds there changes everything. The mysterious kidnapper doesn’t want money. They want Simone to do something. The unthinkable.
A catastrophic chain of events is set in motion, with chilling consequences that extend beyond Simone and her family. What follows is a heart-pounding journey through the small towns and punishing deserts of remote Texas, in which Simone’s courage—and morality—is pushed to the brink as she discovers what it truly means to be a mother.
Unbearably tense, compassionately told, and full of well-crafted moral dilemmas, Caller Unknown proves once again why Gillian McAllister’s thrillers are “the best of the best” (Lisa Jewell).
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Community Reviews
There were so many poor choices made by the main character, Simone. She has flown in from London, where she and her husband live and operate a very successful restaurant. Their daughter is Lucy, who has theatrical ambitions, and has been attending a summer camp for theatre deep in Big Bend region of west Texas. Simone has come to retrieve Lucy from camp, and then they plan to go together for a mother-daughter camping trip in the Big Bend area, before returning back home to London. But on the first night, while Simone sleeps-off her jet-lag, Lucy is kidnapped from the house where they're staying. And Simone wakes to find a ransom message on a burner cell phone - and is warned that Lucy will be killed if she contacts the police. That's the first critical mistake she makes, even going against the advice of her husband, who wants Simone to get the police involved. But I guess, if the protagonist made solid and logical decisions, there might not have been much of a story to tell. And there are plenty of mis-steps throughout - such as smuggling drugs across the border from Mexico, a missing package that doesn't get delivered, a shooting, fleeing on foot across a lonely desert, and the assumption of new identities to get away from the drug lords. A lot of action and, and I've mentioned, bad decisions. It's hard to know just who to trust.
I found this to be a very disappointing read. I constantly struggled to connect to the main characters or stay interested in the plot. I also felt that it dragged on far too long and that I kept checking to see how much I had left before it was over. I did see that it had a lower than favorable rating on Goodreads before reading it but I had waited so long that I decided that I would still give it a go. I would not recommend this one. The author has better ones - Wrong Place, Wrong Time is still my personal favorite from her.
I liked all the plot twists, and didn't see the ending coming. I didn't like the description of this part of Texas. She should have done a little more research especially about needing proper I.D.s, travel, and buying weapons. Texas does its own thing, but come on.
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