The best books involving kidnapping

I love this book because it asks more questions than it answers.

Picoult’s approach is always about allowing the reader to enter deeply into what her characters are experiencing, and she handles the issue of kidnapping with the same grace and sensitivity she’s used in approaching other difficult and occasionally taboo subjects.

As Delia plans her wedding, she is plagued by flashbacks of a life she can't recall. What happens when you find out you aren’t who you thought you were? How do you make sense of the people you love and trust morphing into something more sinister? How can you reach for what you’ve always wanted when it means losing something else?

You’ll think about all this—and more—for a long time after you’ve closed the book.

This is a rollercoaster ride of a thriller, with a whole lot of moments that will get your pulse racing (I actually, at one point, was stumbling around my house, unable to put the book down as I tried to do other things!).

Like Picoult, Lapena uncovers questions that no one truly wants answered. What are your most basic values? How do you live them? How well do you know the people you love, the people you see every day? Do we all keep secrets? What are yours? (And, first of all, who goes to a dinner party next door, leaving a baby unattended?)

Lapena stumbles occasionally—her characters aren’t as well-drawn as they could have been, and her ending is delivered with more confusion than necessary—but I still recommend the book.

This book is both absolutely gorgeous and deeply disturbing.

The premise is simple: in an FBI interview, a young woman recounts the horrific ordeal she’s survived as a member of a serial killer’s “garden” of kidnapped victims. The reading experience is considerably more complex. Much of the story is told in flashbacks, allowing the reader to explore Maya’s experience in the Garden; that’s then balanced with her FBI interview, filling in blanks and establishing her as an almost-reliable narrator.

The dual timeline—one of my favorite devices to read and write—is handled brilliantly, and Hutchinson successfully achieves a formidable tightrope act, balancing the brutality of torture and murder with an elegant and refined narrative.

Her darkness is graceful—but it’s still darkness. 

This memoir is both haunting and oddly inspirational.

On 10 June 1991, eleven-year-old Jaycee Dugard was abducted from a school bus stop within sight of her home in Tahoe, California. It was the last her family saw of her for over eighteen years. In 2009 an investigation discovered her living in a tent behind her kidnapper’s house.

I love this memoir for a whole lot of reasons, but in large part because there’s not a trace of self-pity in her account—despite her having had so much of her life “stolen” from her—and because of her determination to find faith in humanity again.

I don’t often read YA novels, so I’m grateful to the friend who insisted I read this one.

Imagine picking up a milk carton imprinted with images of missing children—and seeing your own face there. This story is written with a kind of hectic immediacy through the eyes of 15-year-old Janie Johnson, who now must find out who she really is. Confronted, her parents share what they believe to be her story: she is really their grandchild, the child of their long-missing daughter who disappeared into a cult.

 As it turns out, even the story within the story offers another distortion. (The only caveat I’ll add is that this book is a little dated, clearly written before #metoo, and the reader may experience some slight discomfort in that area.)

There is now a series of novels about this protagonist.