ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – Caller Unknown by Gillian McAllister

Posted on 20th April 2026 By Nicola

Caller Unknown by Gillian McAllister is published by Penguin Michael Joseph and is available now. My thanks to the publishers for the proof copy.

A road trip across America with her teenage daughter was meant to be much-needed bonding time for Simone before Lucy leaves home for university.

But on the first night of their stay, in a cabin deep in the Texan desert, Simone wakes to find Lucy missing and a mobile phone in her place. The phone rings and the voice on the other end issues instructions: Don’t tell the police. Come to this location. Be prepared to do a deal…

There is nothing Simone wouldn’t do to save her daughter. Hide the truth. Commit a terrible crime. Become a wanted woman.

But this is no ordinary kidnap and ransom. Getting Lucy back is just the beginning.

I consider myself to be a Gillian McAllister fan and Caller Unknown is now one of my favourites of her books (along with How to Disappear and Wrong Place Wrong Time).

Simone flies to the US to meet up with her teenage daughter Lucy who has been at summer camp before hopefully taking up a place at RADA. Bar some temporarily lost luggage, all goes well until the morning after Simone’s first night in Texas when she wakes up to find Lucy gone and a phone in her place. Lucy has been abducted and from that moment Simone’s only purpose is to get her back. Her husband, Damien, is back home in London but even if he was in Texas, it would still be Simone who would be following orders not to contact the police, complying with the abductor’s demands, and doing all she could to save Lucy.

Some reviewers have said a suspension of disbelief was required when reading this book but of course that is the case as who can really imagine being in Simone’s situation? It doesn’t happen very often but it does happen sometimes. What shone through from start to finish is what parents, and mothers in particular, will do for their child, the hoops they will jump through, the laws they will consider breaking and the sacrifices they will make, all to keep their child safe. McAllister, in Caller Unknown, writes what she does best: a psychological thriller with moral dilemmas scattered throughout and a love story, not only between wife and husband, but in this case, even more powerfully, between mother and child.

I found this book very hard to put down. It’s pacy and full of cliffhangers (good ones that lead into the next chapter rather than leaving you hanging for longer) and it’s exciting, edge of your seat, ‘one more chapter’ brilliant. The plot is so well executed and there are so many passages of wisdom about family life that I wish I had marked them all to come back to and read again. This is such a fantastic book.

Gillian McAllister is the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of nine stand-alone novels. Her books have been selected for the Radio 2 Book Club, Reese’s Book Club and the Richard & Judy Book Club. Her previous novel, Wrong Place Wrong Time, was a Waterstones Thriller of the Month and was shortlisted for The British Book Awards Crime & Thriller Book of the Year and the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. Gillian’s books are published in thirty-eight languages.