I hadn’t planned to do a Spoiler Discussion for The Trap by Catherine Ryan Howard. But the comments and questions started rolling into my Review of the Trap and I realized that this book MUST be discussed. It’s diabolically twisty and confusing, so let’s figure it out together! Here’s my Spoiler Discussion for The Trap by Catherine Ryan Howard!
Notes and Table of Contents for The Spoiler Discussion of The Trap
I usually I write my Spoiler Discussions for those who have read the book.
In the case of this book, many of us were confused when we got to the end. Because there is some serious sleight of hand going on in this book.
I have designed this Spoiler Discussion to be read as you read the book OR after. Feel free to follow along so you don’t have to read twice (like I did.)
Table of Contents for the Spoiler Discussion for The Trap by Catherine Ryan Howard
Characters in the Trap by Catherine Ryan Howard
Plot Summary for The Trap by Catherine Ryan Howard (with twists)
Questions:
Who was the woman at the Circle K?
Who killed Tana?
Who is the woman who escapes the house?
Characters in The Trap by Catherine Ryan Howard
The Missing Women:
Tana Meehan (29): last seen at a bus stop in Kildare after getting off a train from Dublin. Her phone was found the next day near the bus stop.
Kerry Long: missing from Wexford. Her wallet and ID were brought to the police by a charity shop employee.
Nicola (Nicki) O’Sullivan (25):left a Dundrum pub and vanished. Her phone was found in an alleyway near the pub.
Jennifer Gold (18): abducted walking her dog near her home, which seems to be near or in Kilternan. He phone was later found in a nearby hedge.
Lena Paczkowski: disappeared while walking from a Maynooth pub to her boyfriend’s house.
Friends and Family of the Missing Women:
Lucy O’Sullivan: Nicki’s older sister
Chris: Nicki’s boyfriend
Caroline O’ Callaghan: friend of Tana Meehan
Roland Kearns: Tana’s husband and a person of interest in her case.
Margaret Gold: Jennifer’s mother
Sarah and Tommy Meehan: Tana’s parents
Police and Press:
Detective Denise Pope: Garda Síochána (Irish police) family liaison officer for Nicki’s missing persons case.
Detective Sergeant Donal Byrne: head of the MPU (Missing Persons Unit)
Superintendent Colin Hall
Angela Fitzgerald: Civilian Garda Síochána MPU employee who answers phones.
Jack Keane: former reporter and true crime expert.
Operation Tide: the task force looking into the missing women.
Plot Summary for The Trap by Catherine Ryan Howard
I am trying to keep my plot summaries short(er) but in this case, I feel like all this information is important to helping you navigate this confusing story.
I have labeled each chapter with the title and the POV character(s) unless that is a spoiler. As the summary goes on I will reveal the twists!
Get in the plot summary car (haha!) and buckle up!
Prologue: The Circle K Woman
It’s 4:00 am and a woman is trying to get home, but her phone is dead.
A car pulls up, driven by a man with ginger hair. In his back seat is a child’s car seat with a stuffed toy belted in. The woman asks to borrow his phone, but he says he doesn’t have it with him and offers to drop her at the Circle K (a nearby gas station.)
As they drive, he tells her he is out to get heartburn medicine for his pregnant wife. He tells her she looks familiar. Also, he mentions her skimpy clothes and the three or four missing women in the area. He says she “has the look of them.”
Nervous, she mentions that her sister is waiting up and he tells her that her sister is probably “dead to the world.”
They get to the Circle K and she’s incredibly relieved. She heads to the bathroom, reflecting that she has done this before: walking at night in skimpy clothes hoping a monster picks her up. The monster who took her sister and three other women.
Wake Turbulence: Lucy
Lucy is awakened by a security guard in a store parking lot. She reflects that her sister Nicki has been missing for 140 days, but that she needs to move on with her life.
As Lucy heads home, her gossipy neighbor, Mrs. Daly, asks about the for sale sign onLucy’s house and the fact that she is living there with her missing sister’s boyfriend. Lucy thinks bitterly that the police are only interested in finding Jennifer Gold, the most recent of the missing women. Mrs. Daly suggests that there has been breaking news in the case.
Chris, Nicki’s boyfriend, tells Lucy that Denise, their family liaison officer, is there to brief them. She doesn’t have any news about Nicki, but she says that another missing woman named Lena ran into the road and was hit by a car. Lena said she’d been escaped from being abducted by a man and that there were other women with her being held captive.
Lost and Found: Angela
Angela, who answers phones at the Missing Persons Unit, is told that a woman who works at a charity shop has come into the station with a donated handbag.
Angela looks at the purse and its contents, including a wallet belonging to Kerry Long and a bloody bra.
Base Camp: The Unsub (unknown subject)
He’s married to a woman named Amy, who loves watching True Crime documentaries and was shocked to learn from a documentary that Ted Bundy had a girlfriend.
He likens serial killing to climbing mountain summits: dangerous but exhilarating. This is a metaphor he will return to and all his chapters are named thematically.
Past Lives: Lucy
Lucy tells Chris she was about to give up on finding Nicki, but that this new information changes everything.
Before Nicki disappeared she and Lucy had agreed to sell their family home. Then Nicki went out to a birthday party and never came back.
Lucy meets with Jack Keane, a true crime reporter who offers her information in exchange for an interview. He tells her Operation Tide (the investigation into the missing women) is headed by a press-hungry guy.
He doesn’t think Tana Meehan isn’t one of the victims and tells her that Lena was wearing a strange nightgown and talking about a pink house. In exchange for his information, he wants an interview with all the families of the missing.
Gone Girl: Denise and Angela
Denise drives Angela to Kerry Long’s house, where they interview Kerry’s mother. Kerry usually took the bus part of the way home from work and then called a family member for a ride.
But one evening she didn’t call or come home. Then one day, they found her smashed phone in their garden.
Acclimatization: The Unsub/ A Woman
How does he get away with his crimes? He says he knows he’ll be caught one day. He drives an old car with no GPS, stays on small local roads, and leaves his phone at home.
A woman wakes up in the dark. She’s been in this house with three other women all summer. She has no choice and can’t leave. She was trapped.
Kin: Lucy
Lucy gathers the fiends and families of the missing women (Sarah and Tommy Meehan, Margaret Gold and Caroline, a friend of Tana Meehan’s) so she can ask them if they’d be willing to do an interview with Jack Keane.
Before the meeting starts, Caroline asks Lucy if she’s still “going out there at night.” Lucy says she’s going to stop, that she thinks the interview will be more effective.
Margaret Gold is friends with the chief investigator and thinks Jack Keane is a charlatan. She tells the group that Lena ran away and has been pretending to be kidnapped and refuses to participate.
Official Secrets: Denise and Angela
Angela and Denise discuss Operation Tide, a task force to find the mission women. Denise confides that she thinks that Superintendent Hall needed more missing girls to get his task force but stopped counting at three. She thinks here are many more missing women, and Kerry Long was on her list.
Icefall: The Unsub
He talks about the coverage of crime cases. How a perpetrator gets named by the media, something like The Nothing Man (this is a inside joke as that is the name of a prior Catherine Ryan Howard book).he says the author of that book wrote an editorial about centering the victims and finds this ironic.
How does he pick victims? He looks for women distracted by their phones. He didn’t realize how young Jennifer was and didn’t see her dog.
Intrusion: Lucy
Lucy is incensed to see Margaret Gold on the evening news after she refused to do the Jack Keane interview. She falls asleep and wakes to see a man lurking outside her window.
Lines of Enquiry: Angela and Denise
Angela drafts a letter to send to local charity shops. Denise tells her to ask Caroline to post it on social media instead.
Denise takes Angela to talk to Roland Kearns, who says that Caroline O’Callaghan is obsessed with him and sits outside his house.
When they leave, Denise tells Angela that Roland has an alibi for the time of Jennifer Gold’s abduction.
Valley of Silence: The Unsub
The kidnapper talks about his props: a cake box, or flowers. He says thanks to true crime, women aren’t as trusting as they used to be.
The woman in the house decides to leave. The other women think it’s too risky but she goes anyway.
Promises: Lucy
Chris tells Lucy he’s moving to Amsterdam. Jack calls and says he will do an interview with her if she expresses doubts about the police investigation.
He gives her another shocking bit of news: Lena died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
Rogues: Angela and Denise
Angela and Denise watch Lucy’s live TV interview. Lucy is upset that the families haven’t been given information. Lucy speaks about her sister’s good qualities, but points out she could be self-involved. She also points out that Jennifer’s case has received much more attention than those of the other women, who were drunk or wearing revealing clothes, and that Lena had a foreign sounding name.
Lucy then speaks to Nicki’s abductor, saying “Tell me where she is. Show me. Please. Come get me. I will go with you if you take me there.” The police station erupts in outrage.
The Death Zone: Unsub
The kidnapper says he has always had these urges. He talks about his first victim, whom he came upon on the way to his sister-in-law’s birthday party.
She had red hair and was dressed in boots and a long coat. He’d said he was lost and asked her to put the address in her phone.
The Trap: Lucy
Jack Keane is furious at Lucy (for stealing his spotlight) and tells her every crazy person in the country will be coming for her.
Lucy gets a text from “a number she had stored in her phone as Him, so she’d know who it was if he ever tried to contact her,” saying “can we meet.”
Twist Number One: Lucy was not the woman in the opening Circle K scene
“Him” is Roland Kearns, whose number Lucy got from Caroline. Lucy asks him if he was outside her window and she says yes … because she was outside his.
Lucy has been sitting in her car outside Roland’s house every night. Chris found out and she’d promised not to do it again. She asks Roland if he killed Tana and he says no.
Last Seen Alive: Angela
Angela drives to Caroline’s house.
Angela starts to gets a suspicious feeling about Caroline, who seems to have a LOT of pictures of Tana’s husband Roland, pictures that someone cut Tana out of.
Twist Number Two: Maybe Caroline Killed Tana?
Angela tries to act normal, asking Caroline to contact all the charity shops in the area. Then she sees that Caroline is wearing a necklace that belonged to Tana.
She texts her suspicions to Denise.
The Knife Ridge: Unsub
The kidnapper went to the party with the injured woman in his trunk.
He inherited a property from a distant relative and took the woman there, then headed to the party. And he got away with it.
So he did it again, but this time he accidentally left the woman’s wallet in his car.
Twist Three: The Woman’s POV in the House is NOT Lena
The next one, he says, drew too much attention and was able to escape out of the trunk. Then he announces to his audience that they she has arrived and welcomes her to the Pink House.
The woman who left the house swam in the lake and then fell asleep and a guy found her.
Who is this woman?
Spoiler Alert: Lucy
Lucy is outside the butcher shop she’s rented to convert to a cafe when a man comes up to her. He’s here to help her. She asked for his help.
He tells her that she can call the police but not if she wants to find out what happened to her sister.
He tells her he didn’t kill her sister, but her time is running out.
Debrief: Denise and Angela
Denise tells Angela that Caroline tried to escape and has a suspicious patch of earth in her garden.
The woman who escaped was waiting for her punishment from “Bastian.” Then “Jamie” shows up and tells the woman that people are looking for her. The police show up.
Phantom: Unsub
Back to Lucy at the butcher shop. The man tells Lucy he didn’t kill any of them. Just “the first one.” And he had nothing to do with Tana Meehan.
Lucy asks if Nicki is alive and he says he didn’t kill her. She needs to come with him to someplace an hour away. He tells her he calls it The Pink House, which is what Lena said.
She agrees and he throws out her phone.
“So,” he says. “Where did it all start?” (Note that this is exactly what he says in the Base Camp chapter. So Lucy is obviously the one he is talking to in all his POV chapters.
Safe and Well Denise and Angela
Twist Four: Nicki is the one who escaped the house and went in the lake
Denise and Angela arrive at a house with other police officers. Denise says she can’t do missing persons anymore and is asking for a transfer. A woman steps forward and Angela says, “it’s her.”
This must be Nicki, which means in the Unsub POV chapters, the woman “trapped” with other women in a house who escapes, swims in the lake and is brought back, is Nicki, who seems to have NOT been kidnapped but willingly joined a cult or a commune.
Summit: Unsub
He is watching the news with his wife Amy, and sees the Lucy O’Sullivan interview. He’s thrilled that Lucy addresses him. Is this a trap? He decides to call her bluff and tell her his whole story.
He has Lucy in his car.
Answers: Denise and Angela
Nicki now has long dark hair and looks completely different, but apparently one of the cult members saw the newspapers and realized that the police are looking for Nicki.
Nicki is furious. Denise says that Nicki’s sister filed a missing persons report.
Angela reflects that Nicki will “never be fine again.”
Nicki says she wanted to disappear and deliberately left Dublin and her phone and went to The Farm. She was angry at her sister for wanting to sell the house.
Denise tells Nicki that Lucy has been missing for three weeks.
The Face of the Earth: Lucy
Lucy wakes up in pain (presumably this is shortly after she went with her now-captor) and determined to escape. But he there and tells her he didn’t take Nicki and doesn’t know where she is.
One Year Later: Nicki and Unsub
Nicki has performed the same ritual in thirteen towns: drive Lucy’s car there, put on party clothes and stumble around, hoping that He will come and pick her up.
A car does pull up. He isn’t sure it is her. It IS her. The sister. His wife Amy told him that Nicki was wandering around trying to get herself kidnapped.
He offers her a lift to the garage.
Reveal: We Find Out Who This Guy Actually Kidnapped
He discusses his crimes: Kerry, the red haired woman he encountered on the way to the party. Jennifer, then Lena. Finally, Lucy. Now that his wife is pregnant, he stopped visiting the house, which means that all of them died.
Chris has called Denise to tell her what Nicki has been doing. Denise has followed Nicki tonight, but then loses sight of her.
Denise ends up at the Circle K, where she sees Nicki getting out of a car. The driver is a man with reddish hair and when he takes his baby car seat out of the car and puts it in his trunk, Denise gets a weird intuition and snaps a picture of his license plate.
Denise calls Angela and asks her to run the plate. The car belongs to Darren Turner.
Spoiler Discussion for The Trap by Catherine Ryan Howard
I’m going to give my opinion on some questions on the review post. This is only my opinion and I’d love to hear yours, so please leave a comment!
Who is the woman at the Circle K in the Trap by Catherine Ryan Howard?
The woman at the Circle K is Nicki, not Lucy.
Nicki is the also woman in the Unsub (Darren) POV chapters, the one who (easily) escapes from the house, making us think this is the POV of Lena, who also escaped. But we learn that Lena escaped from a car, not a house.
Nicki is not in danger. She got mad that Lucy wanted to sell the house. She took off and eventually ends up in this cultish sort of commune.
Lucy wasn’t at the Circle K OR using herself as bait to find Nicki, she was sitting outside Roland’s house because she thought he took her sister.
Who Were the Actual Kidnapping Victims in The Trap?
According to Darren, his first victim was Kerry Long, who was the redhead he encountered on the way to the party.
Next, he took Jennifer Gold. He didn’t know she was so young.
After that was Lena Paczkowski, but she was too much trouble and escaped from his trunk.
Finally, there was Lucy O’Sullivan, who asked him to take her to her sister Nicki.
Who killed Tana Meehan in The Trap by Catherine Ryan Howard?
There’s no definitive answer, but the circumstantial evidence seems to suggest it was Caroline, who was obsessed with Roland, Tana’s husband, and then creepily inserted herself into the investigation. As creepy criminals love to do.
The role of doubles in The Trap as a way to trick us!
Yes, there’s Timeline Trickery, which reminded me of this very popular-on-TikTok thriller. But there’s also trickery in that we are led to assume one character is another.
We assume Lucy is Nicki. Both are doing dangerous nighttime actitivies to find the other, but Nicki is wandering around pretending to be drunk with a dead phone and Lucy is sitting outside Roland’s house.
We assume Nicki is Lena. We are told a woman escaped from captivity and we assume the POV of that woman is Lena, but actually it is Nicki, who “escapes” the rules of her cult/commune and swims in the lake.
Both Kerry and Tana have red hair, so it’s unclear which of them were Darren victims but it seems like his first victim was Kerry and that Tana was probably killed by Caroline.
There are two murderers, both Darren and (probably) Caroline.
So The Trap has Timeline Trickery AND an unresolved ending?
Yes. The Circle K scenes that bookmark the story are in the present. The scenes with Lucy happened weeks before. The scenes with the woman escaping were during Nicki’s time on the “farm.”
And yes, the ending is unresolved but I think Denise is going to crack the case and at least get justice for Kerry, Jennifer, Lena and Lucy. Hopefully she will dig up Caroline’s lawn and find Tana.
What does The Trap say about true crime and the way missing persons cases are handled?
The Trap is another book that wants to talk about issues. Like this recent mystery by an award winning author.
How Does The Trap Dissect Our Obsession with True Crime?
The Unsub (who we know as Darren) wants to talk a lot about true crime and our obsession with it. What he says is often contradictory. He says women are more cautious now, but yet still careless, distracted by their phones.
His wife watches true crime documentaries, completely unaware that she’s living in one.
He references Ted Bundy, and borrows from his playbook, using props like a baby carseat and a cake box that make him seem less threatening.
He tries to suggest that he can’t help himself, and that it’s not his fault. That Kerry was an accident, Jennifer was a misjudgment, Lena was a mistake, and Lucy came willingly.
What does The Trap say about the way missing persons cases are handled?
Lucy makes pointed remarks about how the press and public care more about an “innocent” teenager than older women who were out drinking before they vanished.
What are your questions and what did you think?
How does Lena end up wearing a nightgown and then wind up in the trunk AFTER being held in the “Pink house”? It doesn’t seem that Darren ever transferred his victims anywhere after he locks them in, presumably, the cellar of the pink house.
That is a very good question.
Denise tells Lucy and Chris that, after her escape, Lena told the paramedics that she was abducted by a man who brought her to a house where she was held for a fortnight.
Then, in one of the perpetrator’s POVs (The Knife Ridge) he explains what happened with Lena. He says she was a pain and became unmanageable, so he took her out of the pink house and put her in his trunk (presumably wearing the nightgown) then drove her to the mountains to show her that there was no escape.
But he didn’t realize that his car had a glow in the dark emergency release button inside the trunk and Lena used that to open the trunk from the inside and escape. I believe he had also put Kerry in there but she was badly injured so I’m sure didn’t see the release button.
I do remember Darren talking about the trunk release. (Kerry was either already dead or nearly dead when he put her in the boot. And was taken to the house to decompose.) But I still don’t know how she ended up in a nightgown. I think the author added that to make it seem like Lena was being held with other, presumably alive, women due to the POV of what ends up being Nicki. But wasn’t the house that Darren inherited already in the mountains?
Yes, Lena says she was held for two weeks. As she mentions other women, unless Kerry recovered (unlikely) that must mean only Jennifer, because I thought we were meant to believe that someone else (Caroline?) was reponsible for Tana. And Lucy was taken after Jennifer.
During those two weeks, Lena must have been given a nightgown. In one of Lucy’s later chapters she mentions her clothing being taken away.
As for the location of the house, lolol I fell down the geography rabbit hole working on the post and actually looked up all the locations, then decided the post was already too long. But I can post the maps if you want.
The pink house is in the Wicklow mountains. Darren says it’s in the foothills, near the Dublin county line. The book mentions that the Wicklow mountains area is huge. Darren says he drove her higher into the mountains, to the most desolate place he can find, and then she escaped.
Ooh! I’d love to see the geography. But don’t clog your blog just to indulge my curiosity. 😃
OK I will email you when it’s up! I think it does help visualize the different locations.
Is there a second book or is this a stand alone?! Such crazy twists and turns!
Yes a second book would be so great, but I haven’t heard that there will be one. It’s such a chilling book!!
Are we to assume, Lucy probably starved to death if he did not return to the Pink House?? Or he killed her?
I needed more of a finite closure.
I hear you!
And I don’t know!! But I feel like when authors see our questions, they sometimes answer them so … maybe? Ruth Ware just answered a question asked on here 🙂
Hello CRH are you there…
I completely agree! I feel cheated. Lucy has been the one that we are rooting for all the way through and then she’s just gone with no finite explanation of what happened to her at the end.
I am so irritated with the plot in which both Lucy and her sister Nicki do NOT think of buying the cheapest tracking device (like the one I have on my cat which I bought for $30 on amazon) so that the police could find them easily?
I mean, both of them at some point are willingly trying to find a serial killer and they come to him without any type of weapon, tracking device or even a pepper spray?
This, to me, is the biggest and most irritating plot hole. Not a single person in their right mind would set up “THE TRAP” for a serial killer, being his live targets without the simplest plan how to catch and escape him.
Hahahaha that is a fair point and I will keep that in mind in case I am ever in this situation.