November 1983. As top supermarket executive Don Tidey sets out on the school run, he is snatched from his car and driven away at speed. The IRA, using kidnapping to fund its armed campaign, has its latest victim.

What follows is a massive manhunt and, twenty-three days later, a chaotic rescue in a Leitrim wood. No one emerges unscathed – not the man at the centre of the drama, not the local community, not the police, not the Irish state. And especially not the families of the soldier and the young police officer killed as Tidey is freed.

Powerful, intimate and searching, The Kidnapping is a brilliantly reported account of an iconic episode and the shadow it still casts.