The Boy Who Didn't Cry
The Boy Who Didn’t Cry is a sensationalist thriller centered on an international hunt for a missing child.
In Richie Rich’s grisly, glamorous thriller The Boy Who Didn’t Cry, a team of experts handle the rescues of those caught in an international child kidnapping scheme.
Jennifer is the daughter of an ultra wealthy arms dealer. Although she looks like an ordinary British mother, she has the skills of a trained soldier, including with weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and tracking. Four years after her child’s abduction, her half-brother is kidnapped as well. Infuriated and mad with grief, Jennifer goes on a global rampage; the closer she gets to her missing child, the smaller the world seems. Her efforts also uncover a child-smuggling ring that’s linked to a high-end Cambodian hotel.
Jennifer’s father’s fortune funds the Kidnap And Rescue Team (KART), a guerrilla group brought together by the common cause of combating child exploitation. As the team traces the missing children, Jennifer wonders if the kidnapping was payback—and if so, what the ultimate price will be.
This fast, bloody thriller is involving; explicit language abounds. Its first chapters introduce and characterize Jennifer’s team members with enough backstory to link them to her. Then, the only quality they seem to have in common—aside from their abiding distaste for people who harm children—is their capacity for violence. Blood spatters the pages as morally bankrupt villains are killed in creative ways: bludgeoned into comas in supermarket parking lots, or stabbed to death in walk-in fridges. These deaths are interspersed with bombastic, explicit sex scenes. But even as it dives into a filthy underworld that stretches from the streets of London to the back alleys of France, the novel feels intimate, as though any neighborhood could house a smuggling operation.
The novel’s attention to technical detail, from the placement of the carotid artery to the weight of a particular type of handgun, to the recovery time for a compound ulna fracture, is strong. Creative descriptions of gore abound, while frequent flashbacks are used to drop clues about the kidnappers and their motives. But the team’s rabid fixation on their mission leaves little time for introspection. That they will find what they’re looking for is never in doubt; the book’s tension centers on what shape the missing child will be in when they’re discovered.
The Boy Who Didn’t Cry is a sensationalist thriller centered on an international hunt for a missing child.
Reviewed by
Claire Foster
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