Kick Lannigan Gets a Little Revenge: One Kick (Chelsea Cain)

One Kick by Chelsea Cain

Kit Lannigan, just seven years old, left the door open and her puppy ran out through it. The nice man driving by offered to help her find Monster… Her family didn’t see Kit again for five years. When she came back to them her name had been changed to “Beth” – and Beth was one of the most popular child pornography actresses ever known.

credit: chelseacain.com

A decade later, Kick Lannigan (she doesn’t answer to Kit for fairly obvious reasons) is every bit as damaged as one might expect of someone with her history. She’s honed her self-defense skills to a razor's edge, can shoot the eyes (or testicles) out of a target almost with her eyes closed and carries more sharp-edged items on her person than might be found in your average surgical suite. She lives on her own, with her adoptive “brother” James and the now-ancient Monster. In her free time, she obsesses about missing children.

The man who called himself John Bishop appeared on her doorstep, bearing a satellite photo of a house somewhere, the face of the most recent missing boy peering through an attic window. Kit has trust issues aplenty, and the mysterious dead-eyed Bishop does not make her decision easy – but (still heavily-armed) she accompanies him on the search. It’s a search that will take her all the way back to her life as Beth; a journey only Kick Lannigan can undertake, and one she must undertake to save a missing child.



Portland’s favorite crime writer, Chelsea Cain, takes a vacation from pink-haired reporter Susan Ward to start a new series with One Kick; leaving behind Ward’s crush on local detective Archie Sheridan and his own extremely unhealthy obsession with serial-killer Gretchen Lowell. In doing so, Cain opens a window on every parent’s nightmare: a stranger abduction. Yet there are strains of similarity between her protagonists, especially the psychopathy of so-called Stockholm Syndrome that manifests itself in Sheridan’s obsession and Kick’s own relationship with the man who not only kidnapped her but turned her into an object of desire for pedophiles around the world.

From a slam-bang opening chapter to the inevitable showdown in the final reel, Cain’s fluid prose keeps the pages turning like a dervish. Her characters inhale sympathy and exhale mystery, a bruised and battered cast that many of us – even men – find ourselves wanting to mother. She owes a great debt to whatever expert(s) on the subject guided her hand through the seamy world of child pornography, experts whose names do not appear in the acknowledgments. That’s not to say that the novel is perfect; Cain regrettably calls on some of the tropes of the “woman in trouble” and “FBI rescuer” genres; but those are only faintly irksome. A Kick Lannigan series is in the works with sequels to One Kick – and that’s probably a good thing. The only downside of such a series is the utter nastiness of reading more about the human filth who create the “Beths” of the world.