The Boy on the Train
by Martin Goodman
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Pub Date 7 Oct 2025 | Archive Date 1 Aug 2025
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Description
"Sinuously written, subtly subversive" - Beatrice Hitchman
Silently, digitally, a boy takes apart your family
A gripping techno-thriller that fuses Patricia Highsmith's psychological intensity with urgent climate activism. When teenage hacker Tom Snelling encounters coal broker Steve McInnes on a train, a chance collision sparks a devastating game of digital cat-and-mouse. Tom, a reclusive coding prodigy driven by eco-fury, systematically dismantles Steve's life—planting child pornography, triggering financial chaos, and exposing the moral rot beneath corporate respectability. But Tom is being watched by Mel, a gender-fluid intelligence operative, while MI5's shadowy "Glyph" operation secretly manipulates them both. As Tom's algorithms threaten to collapse the global fossil fuel industry, the question becomes: can one brilliant, damaged boy save the planet by burning down the system—or will his digital vengeance consume everything, including himself?
Marketing Plan
Writing Thrillers the Patricia Highsmith Way: A podcast / feature / festival program: As a professor of creative writing, Martin Goodman was obsessed by Patricia Highsmith. Topics he will cover in public appearances/interviews:
How did she make her books so compelling? Year after year her crime thrillers were his set texts, he and his students burrow through them to find the secrets of her success.
What novel would a 21st century Patricia Highsmith write? Martin Goodman tried to work that out by putting some of her writing secrets into practice. Like Tom Ripley in Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley, his The Boy on the Train has a Tom who is an identity thief with a troubled backstory.
Martin leads a journey to appreciate what made Ripley click, and how the tricks spun by Patricia Highmith’s mind can be made to work toda
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781917352079 |
| PRICE | US$18.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 320 |
Available on NetGalley
Average rating from 7 members
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