Gap year adventures? The stuff of nightmares
Early in my new psychological thriller, DAUGHTER, MISSING, a mother, Kate, gets a terrifying, life-changing phone call. Her teenage daughter, travelling through Europe, has stopped answering phone calls and messages. Now she and her American room-mate are missing.
What does Kate do? What most parents would. She dashes to her daughter’s last known destination, teams up with the American girl’s mother, and, together, they start to search. What she discovers changes the course of their lives.
The idea of young travellers, far from home, getting into terrible danger has been fermenting in the back of my mind for years.
As a BBC correspondent, based in Asia, I covered many stories about British youngsters who got into trouble abroad. Some seemed so excited by their new-found independence and the great adventure of meeting new people and experiencing new places that they’d flout rules they would surely have applied in England.
They’d forget to be cautious about trusting strangers and being careful around drink and drugs. They might not take proper advice about keeping safe in the heat, on the roads, in bustling cities, in the wilderness. They seemed to feel free, in a foreign land, to take risks they wouldn’t have taken back home.
Most get away with it. I can remember myself, decades ago, back-packing alone through Asia and setting off on a remote, week-long trek with a foreign couple I’d only met that morning. I was lucky. I came home safely. Sadly, not everyone does.
I’ll never forget the tragic story of a young English lad who simply disappeared into uncharted Indian jungle after launching himself off a cliff, paragliding.
I spent time with his parents, a delightful couple, plunged into their worst nightmare. They were suddenly in India, halfway round the world, trying to negotiate heat, language barriers and an unfamiliar culture, as well as their own desperation, as they tried to discover what had happened to their son. Sadly, he was never found.
Travelling cheaply can be an unforgettable rite of passage for youngsters. A time for them to recover from the stress of exams, to see the world, try new things and meet new people.
But for some, like Kate’s daughter, it becomes life-changing in all the wrong, horrific ways.
You can pick up your copy of DAUGHTER, MISSING here: https://mybook.to/DaughterMissing