The Kidnapping of Alice Ingold by Cate Holahan

Item: The Kidnapping of Alice Ingold
Author: BaronessMom

Posted January 26, 2026 by BaronessMom in Review, Thriller and Suspense / 0 Comments

I voluntarily reviewed an Advance Reader Copy from NetGalley. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

The Kidnapping of Alice Ingold

by Cate Holahan
Published by Thomas & Mercer on November 1, 2025
Setting: California
Genres: Psychological Thrillers
Pages: 340
Format: Audible Audiobook, Kindle, Paperback
Source: NetGalley
Goodreads
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Get Your Copy at: Amazon

A harrowing abduction becomes a tantalizing nationwide game in a twisty and ingenious novel of suspense by a USA Today bestselling author.

Alice Ingold has been kidnapped. Call the police. Alert the media. You can’t play this game without all the pieces.

Beautiful, blond, and immensely privileged, Alice Ingold is the perfect victim for a true-crime obsessed culture―and for a masked duo with a singular purpose. Instead of a demand for ransom, her captors have a riddle, and they’re inviting the entire country to solve it.

No one is more invested in the search than Alice’s parents: Catherine, a socialite with obscene generational wealth, and Brian, a visionary AI tech guru. But while Brian turns to machines to solve the problem, Catherine tries to crowdsource the solution, stopping at nothing to bring her daughter home. And America isn’t just watching the story unfold…it’s playing along. The nationwide scavenger hunt for Alice is on.

As an increasingly desperate Catherine strives to understand each new clue, a complex picture of the crime develops. Soon, everyone will see the kidnapping of Alice Ingold for what it is―and Alice won’t be the only one who will need saving.

The Kidnapping of Alice Ingold by Cate Holahan starts slowly, but you won’t want to put it down.

Will Alice be returned to her parents?

Alice Ingold

Alice is our main point of view. She is many things, including young, a daughter, a girlfriend, a friend, a college student, and wants to be a writer. However, Alice is also from a very wealthy upper-class family, and her father is an absent workaholic, and her mother fails to see Alice’s side of things the majority of the time. We get to know Alice quite well throughout the storyline. Alice grows so much from the start to the end. Although she does put herself in harm’s way for the most part, she really steps up to accept full responsibility.

The Story

I enjoyed the story once we got into part two. I felt like part one was a bit dragged out. But once we got into the second part, I couldn’t put it down. It may have taken a minute to get used to the author’s writing style, or maybe it was getting to know the characters. Either way, I was all in and had to know what was actually going on. Honestly, I felt so bad for Alice’s mom. Her dad is a piece of work. But her mother loves Alice, and I think Alice knows that deep down.

So, the premise is in the title. Alice is kidnapped, and this explains why and how she makes it back. She is such a brilliant girl. I hope that society, social media, and AI aren’t as bad as represented in the book, but I already see some of what the author talks about happening around me. Besides being a thrilling ride, there is a parallel with reality that should make us all think about whether AI should be regulated.

Four Stars

My rating for The Kidnapping of Alice Ingold by Cate Holahan is four stars. I enjoyed the story and hope that you will too.

Thank you for dropping by! I hope you enjoyed this review of The Kidnapping of Alice Ingold by Cate Holahan.

Until the next time,

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About Cate Holahan

Cate Holahan is a USA Today Bestselling thriller/suspense author and screenwriter.

She has six standalone novels and is co-author of the #1 Audible bestselling series Young Rich Widows, its sequel Desperate Deadly Widows, and the planned third and fourth installments, purchased by Audible.

Her seventh solo book, The Kidnapping of Alice Ingold, will be published by Thomas & Mercer in September 2025.

Her novels have been translated into multiple languages and optioned for television. Her fifth novel, Her Three Lives, was a Good Morning America book club selection and her second book, The Widower’s Wife, was a Kirkus Best Book of 2016. Her third novel, Lies She Told, was a Kirkus Best Book of 2017, as well as a Book of the Month Club Sept. 2017 selection.

She’s written two original movies for MarVista Entertainment which have aired on Fox’s Tubi: Deadly Estate (March 2023) and Midnight Hustle (August 2023). She has multiple scripts and a pilot being shopped by production companies, and BET Studios optioned The Widower’s Wife and is developing it for TV.

In a former life, she was a journalist and TV producer. She has written for BusinessWeek Magazine, New Jersey’s The Record Newspaper, The Boston Globe, MSN Money and CNBC.

A bi-racial American writer of Jamaican and Irish descent, Cate is a member of Crime Writers of Color, Sisters in Crime, and The Authors Guild. She has an MFA in Dramatic Writing from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts ’23 and a BA from Princeton University.

She lives in Tenafly, NJ, with her husband, two daughters, and two dogs, and spends many a break in Jamaica, where she’s also a citizen.