‘One Kick’: Iowa City Name reads from thriller Monday

Chelsea Cain's latest thriller, 'One Kick” (Simon & Schuster, 309 pages, $25.99), is the first book in a new series featuring Kick Lannigan, a young woman who suffered the horror of abduction and child pornography. Ten years after her rescue, Lannigan is attempting to make a life for herself and James, a similarly exploited man she has adopted as her brother. Their efforts to achieve some sort of normalcy are upended when Kick is visited by a mysterious man who drags her into an urgent search for two abducted children.

When Cain visits Prairie Lights to read from the new book, she will be returning to a town that plays an important part in her personal history. Cain was born in Iowa City in 1972 and raised for several years in a commune outside of town. She returned to Iowa City as a graduate student in journalism, and her master's thesis formed the basis of her first book, 'Dharma Girl,” which is, in part, about her time in the commune.

Cain's new character had a much more harrowing childhood than the author. Kick, who has trained herself to be ever vigilant and extremely dangerous, is a complex character, and Cain explores that complexity skillfully. Meanwhile, the author neither shies away from Kick's demons nor from the violence and perversion that drive the story.

Arguably, in service of ratcheting up the tension, Cain allows Kick to be abused by the man who is to become both her goad and her ally. Bishop invades Kick's life in a manner that triggers all of her defenses. The maneuver is cold and callous; it's also no doubt calculated on both the character and the author's part. It struck me as needlessly cruel in a book already awash in cruelty.

'One Kick” is a dark and disturbing book that may well remind readers of Andrew Vachss' grim series of novels featuring Burke, which covers some of the same terrible territory.

FYI: READING

' What: Chelsea Cain reads from 'One Kick”

' Where: Prairie Lights Bookstore, 15 S. Dubuque Street, Iowa City

' When: 7 p.m. Monday

' Cost: Free