The Island
USA Today called The Island “this summer’s major literary thrill ride.” That description is well-deserved..
The Baxters are an American family from Seattle. Tom Baxter, a well-known neurosurgeon in his forties, has been invited to Melbourne to deliver a keynote address to a medical conference. Accompanying him are his two teenage children and his young second wife, Heather, who’ve come to Australia with him, hoping to squeeze in a few days of family tourism and adventure around the conference.
Tom and Heather have only been married a few months. The children, still grieving for their own mother who died last year, are not at all keen on their new stepmom. They think Heather knows nothing about how to be a mom—and she agrees, though she’s trying to do her best.
Heather persuades Tom to take a day off from conference prep to do something for the kids. They rent a car and drive out of the city. It’s a hot day, 106 degrees Fahrenheit. They stop at a roadside food stand for lunch, and the kids complain loudly that they still haven’t seen any kangaroos or koalas. Two locals overhear them, and offer to take them —for a fee—across on a ferry to their private island, where there are lots of koalas and other animals.
While driving around the island, Tom Baxter accidentally hits and kills a young woman on her bicycle. Believing that an investigation or outcry would delay their return to the mainland, Tom and Heather make a mistake: they decide to hide the body and drive back to the ferry.
From then on, the Baxters are into an unrelenting nightmare. Before the they can leave the island, the hit-and-run is discovered. The island is ruled by its only inhabitants, the O’Neill family, who are a law unto themselves, governed by a family matriarch and her many violent and psychopathic offspring.
The O’Neills capture and imprison the Baxter family. Heather and the children are separated from Tom and chained up in a barn, with a clear threat of violent and even fatal outcomes hanging over them.
They’re into a life-or-death struggle for survival. Without any access to water or food, and having to cope with the white-hot Australian sun, they need to evade the murderous crew who are determined to find them. Heather, who’s been underestimated all her life, has to find strength and determination she didn’t know she had, to save two kids who have no respect for her and don’t want to do anything she suggests.
The story is a propulsive read: McKinty is a skilled and faultless builder of suspense, and his portrayal of the unfolding relationships between these characters is gripping, bringing the story to a stunning climax.
Adrian McKinty’s life story is almost as dramatic as the books he writes, providing a lesson in how hard it is for even an award-winning author to make a living as a writer, and how many years it can take to become an overnight success.
McKinty was born in 1968 in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, growing up in a working-class family during the worst decades of what’s known as “the Troubles.” He won a scholarship to Oxford, where he studied politics and philosophy, graduating in 1993 as the first member of his family to go to university. Having fallen in love with Leah, a girl he met at Oxford, he followed her to New York City where he worked at various jobs (barman, security guard, driver). After three years, they married and he became a US citizen. They moved to Colorado, where he taught high school English and started writing fiction in his spare time. He published a few short stories and a novella before his first full-length novel, Dead I May Well Be, came out in 2003. He followed that book with two sequels (the Dead Yard and The Bloosmsday Dead), three YA novels, and a standalone novel (Hidden River).
These books were winning awards and getting great reviews, so when Leah was offered an academic position in Melbourne, Australia, Adrian decided to try writing full time. The first of his Sean Duffy books, The Cold Cold Ground—a police procedural set in Northern Ireland during the 1980s—was published in 2012, to considerable acclaim. By 2017 he’d published five more novels in the Sean Duffy series. The books were very well received, winning award after award.
But awards and great reviews don’t pay the rent. In 2017 the family was evicted from the house they were renting in Melbourne. McKinty wrote in his blog that he was quitting as a writer: he needed to contribute more to his family’s finances than the thin income his novels were providing. He planned to spend a year getting Australian qualifications to teach school, and in the meantime he began working as a bartender, supplementing the work with shifts as an Uber driver.
But then—how great is this?—another writer, Don Winslow, who had met McKinty for a few minutes at a writers’ conference a few years earlier, read his blog and decided to intervene. Winslow convinced his own agent to read the Sean Duffy books, and the agent called McKinty in the middle of the night to ask him if he thought he had an American thriller in him.
That conversation turned McKinty’s writing fortunes around. It resulted in him writing The Chain, a thriller that got him a six-figure advance from a major publisher. The book came out in 2019, quickly became a New York Times and international bestseller, and won a lucrative Paramount Pictures deal for the screen rights.
The Island, published in July 2022, became another instant New York Times bestseller. Not surprisingly, Hulu has already optioned the story for a limited series.
McKinty and his family now live in New York City, and their days of precarious finances are hopefully at an end.
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