Plano Reads: The Other People – Plano Library Learns

Read a review of The Other People by C. J. Tudor, our Mystery Book Club pick for May.

This month is our first Zoom/In-person hybrid meeting. You can join us virtually on September 16 at 7 p.m. using Zoom! Register online here. Or you can come in person to the Genealogy Program Room in the basement of Haggard Library at 7 p.m. We’ll have things set up so that virtual and in-person attendees will all be able to see and hear each other!

The Other People by C. J. Tudor

Currently available through the catalog as well as Overdrive on the Libby app.

Description from Overdrive:

A gripping thriller about a man’s quest for the daughter no one else believes is still alive, from the acclaimed author of The Chalk Man and The Hiding Place.

Q: Why are you called the Other People?

A: We are people just like you. People to whom terrible things have happened. We’ve found solace not in forgiveness or forgetting. But in helping each other find justice.

Driving home one night, stuck behind a rusty old car, Gabe sees a little girl’s face appear in its rear window. She mouths one word: Daddy. It’s his five-year-old daughter, Izzy. He never sees her again.

Three years later, Gabe spends his days and nights traveling up and down the highway, searching for the car that took his daughter, refusing to give up hope, even though most people believe she’s dead.

When the car that he saw escape with his little girl is found abandoned with a body inside, Gabe must confront not just the day Izzy disappeared but the painful events from his past now dredged to the surface.

Q: What sort of justice?

A: That depends on the individual. But our ethos is a punishment that fits the crime.

Fran and her daughter, Alice, also put in a lot of miles on the road. Not searching. Running. Because Fran knows what really happened to Gabe’s daughter. She knows who is responsible. And she knows what they will do if they ever catch up to her and Alice.

Q: Can I request to have someone killed?

A: If your Request is acceptable, and unless there are exceptional circumstances, we fulfill all Requests.

Two years ago Gabe’s wife and daughter, Izzy, were murdered in a home invasion. Gabe was too distraught to identify their bodies, but he knows Izzy can’t be dead; at the moment they were supposedly killed, he was trying to tail a car through rush-hour traffic because he was certain Izzy was frantically calling to him from the back window. Now Gabe obsessively searches English highways for the car in which his daughter had been riding. His only ally is The Samaritan, a mysterious figure who offers reassurance and protection and who eventually finds the car. Paperwork in the glove compartment leads Gabe to The Other People, a Dark Web group that offers crime victims a chance at retribution but at a soul-snatching cost. Meanwhile, Fran and seven-year-old Alice have evaded The Other People’s volunteer killers for years. But, while Gabe closes in on Izzy’s kidnapper, Fran disappears, leaving Alice to trust strangers with her life. A breathless escape story with hints of the supernatural and the promise of redemption dangling just out of reach. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.

– Booklist Reviews 2019 December #1

From the Penguin Random House website –

C. J. Tudor is the author of The Burning Girls, The Other People, The Hiding Place, and The Chalk Man, which won the International Thriller Writers award for Best First Novel and the Strand Magazine Award for Best Debut Novel. Over the years she has worked as a copywriter, television presenter, voice-over artist, and dog walker. She is now thrilled to be able to write full-time, and doesn’t miss chasing wet dogs through muddy fields all that much. She lives in England with her partner and daughter.

For more on C. J. Tudor click here Penguin Random House C.J. Tudor