Stockholm syndrome: the psychological tendency of a hostage to bond with his or her captor.
What happens when you love the man you should hate?
Beth Sutton is eighteen years old when Dominic Perdue abducts her. Held prisoner in a basement, she’s dependent upon him for food, clothes, her very existence. As the months pass, her hatred towards him changes to compassion. Beth never allows herself to forget, however, that her captor has killed another woman. She has evidence to prove it, not to mention Dominic’s own admission of murder.
Then Beth escapes…
And discovers Dominic Perdue is not a man who lets go easily. Meanwhile, despite being reunited with her family, she spirals into self-destructive behaviour. Release from her prison isn’t enough, it seems. Can Beth also break free from the clutches of Stockholm syndrome?
A study of emotional dependency, The Second Captive examines how love can assume strange guises.
Reviews:
By Nycole Lee
We get to see the inner workings of a kidnapping from both the captive girl's perspective, and the kidnapper's point of view. Beth is young, naive, and desperate to find someone that can teach her and give her experiences that she's only dreamed of. Her willingness to trust prove to a major flaw, as she allows the handsome, charming Dominic to take her from her sheltered world only to trap her in his basement.
Then, we see Dominic's entire thought process... how he wants both a companion and a motherly figure. Having lost his mother at a young age, he has a deep desire to fill that void, and Beth seems to fit his vision. While young, she is health, easily trainable, and first his vision of the perfect captive.
This story will keep you gripped from the very first page. I highly recommend it!
In my reviews of previous Maggie James novels, I’ve mentioned her uncanny talent for planting you inside her characters’ heads, conveying a sense of logical rationality to their psychological dysfunctions. It’s worth repeating, since Maggie’s latest release, The Second Captive, is another excellent example.
The psychological flaws of her characters, so convincingly drawn by an author having no background in psychology, are testament to her talent. Her characters grope like blind persons through the maelstrom of their lives, bumping into bits and pieces of a deeper mystery surrounding them, which they cannot see. If you weren’t inside their heads, you would consider their behavior aberrant, certainly deviant, the kind of morbid and tragic stuff you see on the evening news. Being inside their heads, their behavior is rendered understandable, even reasonable. It’s a perspective this author excels at, creating histories and circumstances for her characters which draw the reader into a fascinating psychological pathology.
The Second Captive also illustrates Maggie’s mastery at combining psychology and suspense. She weaves the threads of these disparate characters and their histories into a compelling mystery, hinted at along the way, but revealed to her characters and readers alike, only after unsuspected twists, turns, and false starts. The kind of suspense to keep you planted in one spot turning page after page until you reach the end, leaving you in hungry anticipation for what Maggie James will conjure up next.
About the Author
Maggie James is a British author who lives in Bristol. She writes psychological suspense novels. The first draft of her first novel, entitled His Kidnapper’s Shoes, was written whilst travelling in Bolivia.
Maggie was inspired by an impending milestone birthday along with a healthy dose of annoyance at having procrastinated for so long in writing a novel.
His Kidnapper’s Shoes was published in both paperback and e-book format in 2013, followed by her second novel, entitled Sister, Psychopath. Her third novel, Guilty Innocence, like her first two, features her home city of Bristol. S
he has recently published her fourth novel, The Second Captive. Before turning her hand to writing, Maggie worked mainly as an accountant, with a diversion into practising as a nutritional therapist. Diet and health remain high on her list of interests, along with travel. Accountancy does not, but then it never did.
The urge to pack a bag and go off travelling is always lurking in the background! When not writing, going to the gym, practising yoga or travelling, Maggie can be found seeking new four-legged friends to pet; animals are a lifelong love!
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