Is it just me, or are kidnappings suddenly popular again?  At least in pop culture.  The past two months, in my Book of the Month box, I’ve picked out two books.  Both books involved kidnapping.

Last season also had the show, “The Family” on ABC about a boy who was kidnapped and “returned” to his family years later.  Just as things started getting interesting in the show (was he the kidnapped boy?  how did he escape?), it was cancelled.  This plot is similar to the first of the kidnapping books I got these past two months.

Good as Gone by Amy Gentry

The story is told from different perspectives, mainly the mother of the kidnapped girl and the kidnapped girl herself.  The story begins by showing what the younger sister of the kidnapped girl saw when her sister was taken in the middle of the night at age 13.  Years later, the mother answers the door and finds what seems to be her daughter returning from her ordeal.  Or is it?  Dun-dun-dunnnnnnn!!!  The story follows the mother as she tries to piece together what happened, and if the woman who shows up at her door is her daughter.  The reader is constantly second guessing as well.  The story of the young woman kidnapped, Julie, is told backwards until you finally see the night that she was “taken”.  The book is so engrossing that I finished it in one day.  One full day of reading.

On the more traditional side, the second kidnapping book focused on a baby being taken from her family home while the parents are next door for a dinner party.

The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena

The couple in the story are married with a new baby.  While battling post-partum depression, the mother is having a hard time adjusting to “normal life” with her husband.  One night, they head next door for a dinner b-day party for the couple next door (see what I did there?).  The wife is a flirtatious lady who spends most of the night with the other husband trying to entice him to cheat on his wife.  Finally the wife has enough and decides to go home.  Although they had a baby monitor and checked on the baby every half hour, the baby is no longer in the crib when they arrive at 1 in the morning.  The story follows the voices of the married couple as they try to determine who did this to them (or who could benefit most, or if one of them might have killed the baby by accident).  It’s a twisty novel with a big reveal at the end that was pretty surprising.  The clues are there the whole time, but you don’t really add them up until the final few chapters.  It was another book that I had a problem putting down b/c I wanted to know what happened and who took the baby!

So two thumbs up on both of these twisty books.