The Couple Next Door

These chapters follow a more conventional police procedural plot with the arrival of the ransom demand and the telltale onesie. For two chapters, the novel follows a typical kidnapping scenario: the terrified and anxious parents, the specific sum of money, the instructions to a remote drop off point, and the obligatory caution not to involve the police. After building up a reasonable scenario involving either or both parents, the novel pivots. Suddenly Lapena introduces evidence that exonerates the parents. The reader is thrown back into the dilemma posed first by the opening chapter: who took Cora?

That raises questions about Chapter 17, in many ways the most important chapter in the novel. In Chapter 17, Marco, the loving and supportive husband, takes a drive in his Audi as his interior monologue reveals how he arranged Cora’s kidnapping with Bruce Neeland, a near-total stranger, over drinks in a bar, motivated by his floundering business and his father-in-law’s cold refusal to bail him out with half a million dollars. Anne’s postpartum depression is revealed to be a red herring; she did not harm her child. Marco’s confidence takes on a darker component as the declares that “He has regrets now, but it will all be worth it” (143). The novel then pivots again, focusing on the motivations of a very amateur criminal and the psychological maneuverings that create, for Marco, a rationale for what he has done. Marco, his daughter still with a man he barely knows, coolly, calmly rationalizes to himself that the plan was foolproof and no one, including Cora, would ever be at risk: “Had he felt that were any actual risk to Cora at all, he never would have done it. Not for any amount of money” (144). When the supposed kidnappers actually make the demand later—far in excess of what Marco and Bruce Neeland agreed to ask for—Marco finds the hike in demands acceptable, even expected. Yet as he sits by the lake, he struggles to understand why Bruce has not followed their plan. Marco admits, for the first time since he made the plans, that he is worried.

Chapter 17 reveals information neither Anne nor the police have and transforms the novel from police procedural into psychological thriller. Indeed, the revelations of Chapter 17 would belong at the end of a more conventional whodunit-style mystery. Now, suddenly, Marco’s character is under scrutiny, not by the detective, who at best has suspicions, and certainly not by Anne, who still regards her husband as supportive despite suspecting an affair, by the narration itself. The actual swap for money then plays as irony. Marco has no reason to suspect that the plan will go awry. When Marco “feels a sharp pain in his head and falls heavily to the ground” (152), suddenly, he—and by extension the reader—is thrown into confusion. Expecting Marco to be the culprit, to return a hero with the baby and no regrets over the ransom money, the reader is left questioning how Marco’s brilliant plan has gone wrong and the well-being of the baby is suddenly in play. Not surprisingly, when Marco comes to and finds the money gone and no Cora, his first reaction is not panic that his child is in genuine danger, but rather he regrets his own stupidity, calling himself a “fool”.

At the close of Chapter 21, Lapena presents Cynthia as even more calculating than Marco or Richard. Cynthia and Graham’s arguing about how best to use the recording to blackmail Marco for money shows no regard for Cora’s safety and actively obstructs the police investigation. The rationalizations that Cynthia uses are stark and cold-blooded. She knows the video recording would greatly help the police. However, “she has something on Marco, and it’s got to be worth something…It’s a heartless thing to do, but what kind of man kidnaps his own child? He has it coming” (179). The moral relativism, the cool rationalizations, and the pure mercenary motivation gives the novel a deeper and even more troubling level of behavior and introduces a most forbidding sort of parlor game: which character is the most venial? While these adults game the kidnapping, somewhere, someone has a six-month old baby.