Captive

Now updated with a new afterword, Captive is an emotional, ripped-from-the-headlines exposé that lays bare the secretive cult that shocked the world—for fans of Leah Remini’s Troublemaker and Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear. I am a mother whose child is being abused and exploited. And I am not alone. In 2011, former Dynasty star Catherine Oxenberg joined her daughter, India, at a leadership seminar for a new organization called NXIVM. Her then twenty-year-old daughter was on the threshold of starting her own professional life and they both thought this program might help her achieve her dream. But quickly, Catherine saw a sinister side to the program that claimed to simply want to help its clients become the best versions of themselves. Catherine watched in horror as her daughter fell further and further down the rabbit hole, falling under the spell of NXIVM's hypnotic leader, Keith Raniere. Despite Catherine’s best efforts, India was drawn deeper into the cult, eventually joining an elite “sorority” of women members who were ordered to maintain a restricted diet, recruit other women as “slaves,” and were branded with their leader’s initials. In Captive, Catherine shares every parent’s worst nightmare, and the lengths that a mother will go to save her child. Catherine’s efforts finally led the FBI to take notice—and the journey is not yet over. A powerful depiction of a mother’s love and determination, and with horrifying insider details never revealed in any news story, Captive will keep you reading until the very last page.

Sixteen-year-old Robyn Knollys-Green struggles to keep faith in her father, the British Prime Minister, while being held hostage by a group of extremist that includes an attractive, kind young man called Talon.

In this page-turning rural noir, a woman is forced to confront her own past during a pulse-pounding expedition to deliver a fugitive In a secessionist rural state that has cut itself off completely from urban centres, where living is hardscrabble and poor but “free,” Brooke Holland runs a farm with her husband and two daughters. Their existence at the fringes of modern society is tenuous—they make barely enough from each harvest to keep going—yet Brooke cherishes the loving, peaceful life they have carved out for themselves. She has even begun to believe she is free from the violent history she has kept a secret from her family. When escaped criminal Stephen Cawley attacks the farm, Brooke’s buried talents surface, and she manages to quickly and harshly subdue him. Convinced that he has come in retribution for the blood feud that began years ago, Brooke sets out to bring Cawley to justice, planning to use the bounty on his head to lead her family into hiding far from danger. Fearing that other members of Cawley’s infamous family will soon descend on the farm, Brooke insists that Milo and the girls flee with her, travelling miles on foot across an unforgiving landscape to reach the nearest marshal. Their journey, beginning at the onset of winter with little preparation, brings already strained family dynamics to the breaking point. As Brooke’s ghosts—both real and imagined—close in, the ruthlessness that allowed her to survive her past may become the biggest threat to her hopes for a different future. What follows is a harrowing exploration of family loyalty, trauma and resilience. As haunting and propulsive as it is powerfully written, The Captive is a thrilling debut novel about the seemingly impossible choices we make to survive and protect the ones we love.

An American reporter's chilling account of being kidnapped and imprisoned by the Taliban, in the no-man's-land between Afghanistan and Pakistan Jere Van Dyk was on the wrong side of the border. He and three Afghan guides had crossed into the tribal areas of Pakistan, where no Westerner had ventured for years, hoping to reach the home of a local chieftain by nightfall. But then a dozen armed men in black turbans appeared over the crest of a hill. Captive is Van Dyk's searing account of his forty-five days in a Taliban prison, and it is gripping and terrifying in the tradition of the best prison literature. The main action takes place in a single room, cut off from the outside world, where Van Dyk feels he can trust nobody—not his jailers, not his guides (who he fears may have betrayed him), and certainly not the charismatic Taliban leader whose fleeting appearances carry the hope of redemption as well as the prospect of immediate, violent death. Van Dyk went to the tribal areas to investigate the challenges facing America there. His story is of a deeper, more personal challenge, an unforgettable tale of human endurance.

In March 2005, Ashley Smith made headlines around the globe when she miraculously talked her way out of the hands of alleged courthouse killer Brian Nichols after he took her hostage for seven hours in her suburban Atlanta apartment. In this moving, inspirational account—now a motion picture from Paramount—Ashley shares the details of her traumatic ordeal and expands on how her faith and the bestselling book The Purpose Driven Life helped her survive and bring the killer's murderous rampage to a peaceful end. Like her captor, Smith too had faced darkness and despair. Seeking a new life, she moved to Atlanta, got a job, enrolled in a medical assistant training program, and was beginning to find her way to becoming the kind of mom she wanted her little girl to have. Then Brian Nichols took her hostage. Just hours earlier, he'd allegedly shot to death a judge, a court reporter, a deputy, and a federal agent and escaped in a stolen vehicle. Now she found herself face-to-face with Nichols, a desperate, heavily armed man with nothing left to lose. Juxtaposing the minute-by-minute tale of her experience with the tragedies and triumphs of her own life, Captive is a riveting story that will leave no reader untouched.

One monster. Three innocent girls. Ten years in captivity. 22 August 2002: 21-year-old Michelle Knight disappears walking home. 21 April 2003: Amanda Berry goes missing the day before her seventeenth birthday. 2 April 2004: 14-year-old Gina DeJesus fails to come home from school. For over a decade these girls remained undetected in a house just three miles from the block where they all went missing, held captive by a terrifying sexual predator. Tortured, starved and raped, kept in chains, Captive reveals the dark obsessions that drove Ariel Castro to kidnap and enslave his innocent victims. Based on exclusive interviews with witnesses, psychologists, family and police, this is an unflinching record of a truly shocking crime in a very ordinary neighbourhood. Allan Hall was a New York correspondent for ten years, first for the Sun and later for the Daily Mirror. He has spent the last decade covering German-speaking Europe for newspapers including The Times and the Mail on Sunday. He is the author of two previous books, Monster, an investigation into the life and crimes of Josef Fritzl and Girl in the Cellar: The Natascha Kampusch Story. He lives and works in Berlin.

A literary sensation in Hungary, Gyorgy Spiro's Captivity is set in the tumultuous first century A.D., between the year of Christ's death and the outbreak of the Jewish War. It follows the adventures of the feeble-bodied, bookish Uri, a young Roman Jew. Frustrated with his hapless son, Uri's father sends the young man to the Holy Land to regain the family's prestige. In Jerusalem, Uri is imprisoned by Herod and meets two thieves and (perhaps) Jesus before their crucifixion. Later he has an awakening in cosmopolitan Alexandria, and then returns home to an unexpected inheritance.

After working late one night, Ruby misses her bus home. Taking a shortcut through town down a dark alleyway, she is abducted and taken to a remote location where she is held captive by her kidnapper. Ruby must find a way to escape before she becomes a serial killer's next victim.