Adrian McKinty is best known for his crime fiction, and he has won numerous awards for his Michael Forsythe and Detective Sean Duffy novels. The Chain is something different. The protagonist of this stand-alone thriller isn’t a tough guy from Belfast trying to survive the Troubles. Instead, she’s a single mom forced to discover what she’s willing to do—and to become—to save her child’s life.

The novel’s title refers to its diabolically simple premise: When Rachel Klein’s daughter is kidnapped, Rachel is informed that she must abduct another child in order to get Kylie back. McKinty played with the idea that the sociopathic enterprise to which the title refers stretches back into history. “Maybe this thing went back to Roman times. You know when Julius Caesar was kidnapped by the pirates, maybe Caesar was part of The Chain,” McKinty says with a laugh. “Maybe the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped by The Chain….And I really had fun with that for a few weeks until I realized, ‘Adrian, you're getting away from the central idea of this book, which is Rachel.’”

Rachel is, indeed, a terrific character. When the novel begins, she’s dealing with breast cancer and a tiresome divorce, but she’s also excited about getting a new teaching gig at a community college. The fact that she’s so seemingly normal is a large part of what makes her transformation so compelling. At the same time, Rachel does prove to be extraordinary in her capacity to analyze her situation. One doesn’t have to be a moral philosopher or a professor of ethics to understand that endangering a child is wrong, but it happens that Rachel is a philosopher. When The Chain compels her to perform actions that would have been unthinkable to her before Kylie is abducted, Rachel can’t help but consider what she’s doing in agonizing ethical detail. Having studied philosophy at Oxford, McKinty is well equipped to explore this terrain. “I remember in university we studied Aristotle’s idea of virtue and his idea of a virtuous person. And he said a virtuous person can't just exist as a virtuous person in their mind, they have to do virtuous acts,” the author explains. “If you claim to be a virtuous person but you do unvirtuous, immoral acts, well, then….You are not a virtuous person.”

Having created this character who is unusually mindful of her transgressions as she’s committing them, McKinty refused to make Rachel’s experience easy even though he knew that he ran the risk of alienating some readers. “I didn't want to create a situation where everything happens so quickly that she has no choice. I wanted to create moments where her mind is still, and she’s really thinking about what she’s doing, and then she does it anyway. I really wanted these to be conscious decisions that she was making. Poor Rachel has to go on this incredible emotional, philosophical, moral journey. She has to do monstrous things, but, hopefully, we remain on her side because we understand her.”

Even if we can’t—or don’t want to—empathize with Rachel’s choices, most of us will recognize the very contemporary fears McKinty conjures in The Chain. Electronic spying of various sorts plays a role in the plot, but social media takes center stage. Facebook and Instagram are the tools that parents caught up in The Chain use to find their victims and to plan their crimes. This novel is perfect for an era in which paranoia seems reasonable rather than delusional. We know that we are being watched because we are, ourselves, watchers. McKinty reaches back to the Cold War to find a metaphor. He compares social media to a “Stasi surveillance system, staffed by volunteers,” referring to the East German secret police. “It’s a cheerful Stasi, run by everybody.”

Jessica Jernigan is a writer and editor living in Michigan.