'The Island': Adrian McKinty's dark new novel is this summer's first major literary thrill ride

Adrian McKinty has created a perfect niche for himself: the high-concept domestic thriller. His 2019 kidnapping-for-profit bestseller "The Chain" mixed suburban ennui with a propulsive plot, asking a question so dark and torturous – would you kidnap another child to save your own? – that it was hard to put the book down long enough to ponder the answer.

In "The Island" (Little Brown, 384 pp., 3 stars), he returns to the concerns of families, this time with a stepmother involved, and asks yet another question, often one that comes at midnight, on a darkened road: What would you do if you accidentally killed someone?

'The Chain': Adrian McKinty writes the thrilling page-turner of the summer

Widower Dr. Tom Baxter, 44, and his new wife, 24-year old massage therapist Heather, and his two children, 14-year-old Olivia and 12-year-old Owen, decamp from Seattle to Australia. It’s a work vacation, Tom set to speak at a conference, but it’s also clearly a trip they all need. Maybe this will be the moment Heather becomes more than just Tom’s replacement wife after his first’s tragic death; maybe the kids will start to respect her, despite the fact she’s nearer in age to them than she is to Tom and seems to be little more than their babysitter.

Or, maybe, Tom will run over a deaf girl on a desolate island in his rented Porsche, Heather will decide they should try to hide the body and escape the island, and instead plunge the family into the fight of their lives as they attempt to flee the sadistic clan which runs the island.

Spoiler: it’s the latter.

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McKinty is at his absolute best playing on well-earned fears. If you ran over someone in the middle of nowhere, what would you do? We all think we’d do what’s right, but that’s the very thing about human nature: It’s rarely as simple as knowing what is right and what is wrong. Plus, Heather and Tom had already met several members of O’Neil family, who charitably could be said to have a bad vibe about them. Yet, the Baxters still bought their way onto the O’Neils' land so the kids could see, you know, koalas. But “the landscape was not inspiring. There were no koalas anywhere, just a large grassy heathland that been burned in a recent brushfire and the occasional eucalyptus tree with a crow in it.”

McKinty seems to be making a larger social point about Westerners throwing money at the Indigenous to get a taste of “real” life, when really what they want is a simulacrum of the experience filled with sanitized fluffy animals and a gift shop. It’s ripe for satire, of course, because tourists are always ripe for satire – their entitlement, their presumptuousness, their zest for scripted adventure – and then when reality shows up with a gun and a knife, the Baxters do indeed get to see the real Australia.

Here’s where McKinty stumbles a bit. The O’Neils are portrayed as a backwoods family of rapists and murderers, as if each day they hope to ensnare someone like the Baxters for sport. The big bad, Jacko, is comically overwritten, licking his lips and leering through every scene he’s in, while the matriarch, Ma, hits every Evil Matriarch trope in the book. McKinty is frankly better than that and his desire to play on common fears – that strangers don’t just want to hurt you, they also want to sexually molest you – has a dramatic lessening return on investment. Plus, it’s not needed. The Baxters have committed a real crime – hit and run. They need to pay the price. That the O’Neils desire vengeance is believable enough.

But then, "The Island" isn’t aiming for strict believability, nor a rigid account of reality. It’s all about the chase itself, and here McKinty is a master, speeding up and slowing down the narrative at just the right time, turning this midnight morality play into a bonafide summer thrill ride.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Adrian McKinty's 'The Island' is this summer's first major thriller