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    The Captives: A Novel
    The Captives: A Novel
    The Captives: A Novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Captives: A Novel

    Written by Debra Jo Immergut

    Narrated by Sarah Naughton and Jamie Renell

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    The riveting story of a woman convicted of a brutal crime, the prison psychologist who recognizes her as his high-school crush—and the charged reunion that sets off an astonishing chain of events with dangerous consequences for both.

    As an inmate psychologist at a state prison, Frank Lundquist has had his fair share of surprises. But nothing could possibly prepare him for the day in which his high school object of desire, Miranda Greene, walks into his office for an appointment. Still reeling from the scandal that cost him his Manhattan private practice and landed him in his unglamorous job at Milford Basin Correctional Facility in the first place, Frank knows he has an ethical duty to reassign Miranda’s case. But Miranda is just as beguiling as ever, and he’s insatiably curious: how did a beautiful high school sprinter and the promising daughter of a congressman end up incarcerated for a shocking crime? Even more compelling: though Frank remembers every word Miranda ever spoke to him, she gives no indication of having any idea who he is.

    Inside the prison walls, Miranda is desperate and despairing, haunted by memories of a childhood tragedy, grappling with a family legacy of dodgy moral and political choices, and still trying to unwind the disastrous love that led to her downfall. And yet she is also grittily determined to retain some control over her fate. Frank quickly becomes a potent hope for her absolution—and maybe even her escape.

    Propulsive and psychologically astute, The Captives is an intimate and gripping meditation on freedom and risk, male and female power, and the urges toward both corruption and redemption that dwell in us all.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJun 5, 2018
    ISBN9780062847775
    Author

    Debra Jo Immergut

    Debra Jo Immergut is the author of the Edgar-nominated novel The Captives and the story collection Private Property. She has been awarded a MacDowell fellowship and a Michener fellowship. Her literary work has been published in American Short Fiction and Narrative. As a journalist, she has been a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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    Reviews for The Captives

    3.5/5

    23 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      The Bad Psychologist

      Women’s prisons seem all the rage these days; witness Orange Is the New Black’s success and the recent Mars Room (a better choice, by the way). Here we have another one, a psychological thriller featuring a psychologist, and quite a flawed practitioner at that.

      The gist of it is, psychologist Frank Lundquist finds himself pretty much at the end of his career almost before it has begun. He made a bad diagnostic/judgement call concerning a child patient who turned out to be a kiddie psychopath who killed his sister. What’s worse, he’s the son of a famous, highly respected, and very influential psychologist father. Literally, the man wrote the book on childhood development and Frank served as the subject and later benchmark. You’ll agree being the scion of a landmark researcher and the very yardstick by which parents and doctors judge growing children places a heavy burden on a person. You’re always striving to please your father, live up to his reputation, while you hit all the benchmarks that validate his research. When you fall, you fall very hard. And Frank, always the insecure and diffident type, falls harder than most. Then one day in the dank women’s prison in which he works, who shows up as a prisoner but the girl he dreamed about in high school, the girl who never noticed his pining heart, Miranda. She brings back all his urges and desires and punctuates with new intensity the dismal state of his life.

      Miranda is in for fifty plus years for murder, the deceased being her boyfriend who involved her in a crazy scheme to get rich instantly, then betrayed her twice in the process. She’s the bad girl who began as a very good girl. Her dad served a term as a congressman, until he lost the support of the big backer with money. So desperate for the man’s approval, support, and money, he kowtowed when this man was responsible for the accidental death of his other daughter, Amy, Miranda’s older and admired sister. This incident and her father’s spinelessness drove her off the rails and into the arms of boys and men who weren’t any good for her. Last stop, Milford Basin state prison for women. She seeks psychological help in prison as a prelude to drugged suicide and meets Frank Lundquist. The question becomes, does she recognize him?

      Because for certain, obsessive that he is, he sure recognizes her and derives pleasure from treating her, without acknowledging he knows her, let alone that all these long years he has desired her. And then he hatches a plan, a plan of desperation, a plan that only a man who believes he has reached bottom would conceive and possibly think might work. That is, he dreams up a way to spring her and spirit her away to another, full life with him. Therein lies the twisty road of improbabilities meant to surprise and titillate the reader. But as improbabilities go, these hang together quite well because there’s a little bit of plausibility in them. There’s even a bittersweet payoff at the end, solace for the lovelorn Frank.

      The Captives isn’t terrible but it isn’t spellbinding either. The idea of whether Miranda is using Frank or is Frank’s dupe just isn’t enough to move it along at a quick pace. Plodding probably best describes it.
    • 4/5
      THE CAPTIVES is written unlike any book I’ve read before, and I‘m happy that I did.At first I thought it might bore me because it seemed to contain more rambling thanaction. But I came to realize what you should know beforehand: although there isn’t much action in this book, what action there is is important and is dependent on the rambling thoughts of both the psychologist and Miranda. Pay attention. The rambling should give you a clue.Every other chapter is the psychologist at a women's minimum-security prison who failed at private practice, who seems to have failed at much of what he has ever attempted. Perhaps this is why, when one of his patients at the prison turns out to be a woman he had a crush on in high school, he becomes obsessed with saving her.In every other chapter are remembrances of that woman, Miranda. She seems to have had a normal childhood until her sister was killed in an auto accident. Little by little, we learn of her bad choices from then on and what she did and what she said and what she really intended.The end may surprise you but probably shouldn't.
    • 5/5
      This is the story of a prison psychologist and a female inmate serving fifty two years. in the slammer. What drives the novel is that he recognizes her as a beautiful girl from his high school that he became fixated on. He was a nobody and she doesn't recognize him at all. We learn about her back story on why she is in prison. The psychologist eventually adopts a wholly inappropriate strategy to help her. This is a really unique premise with a very innovative outcome. I loved it and can see why it got all the acclaim that it did.
    • 4/5
      Some Surprising TwistsReview of the Ecco hardcover (2018) edition.I picked up The Captives based on its nomination for the 2019 Edgar Award for Best First Novel and was not disappointed. This has a setup which in less imaginative hands might have ended up as a conventional redemption story i.e. both protagonists have issues, each of them solves that of the other, the psychologist's career is redeemed, the prisoner is proven innocent and is freed: BUT THIS IS NOT THAT NOVEL There are some fairly harsh reviews of this book and I suspect those might partially be because of people's conventional expectations not being met.Instead, the plot takes a dramatically different turn and that is not the end of the twists that are to come. No spoilers here. It will be interesting to read what writer Immergut comes up with for a sophomore effort.Trivia NoteThe cover image, although quite a striking attention grabber, does not really have anything to do with the plot (i.e. this is not a thriller with any blindfolds), unless you want to interpret it in a purely symbolic fashion i.e. people held captive to their innermost desires and/or demons.