Captive: The Story of the Cleveland Abductions by Allan Hall

Paperback:  One monster, three women, 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, Michelle, Amanda and Gina fell victim to the dark obsessions that drove Ariel Castro to kidnap and enslave them.

In his Prologue, the author wrote, "In this book, all aspects of the horrors endured by the Cleveland captives are explored, while the key figure, Castor, remains centre stage.  The world wants to know what made his dark heart beat.  Who formed him?  What motivated him?  What petty fortunes of life forced his soul to morph into the twisted, terrible thing it became?"

"Ultimately, there was a happy ending of sorts.  His victims survived.  They will heal.  They will, it is hoped, find love and happiness in a world they thought had forsaken them.  They, not Castro, are the victors."

Based on exclusive interviews with witnesses, psychologists, family and police, Captive:  The Story of the Cleveland Abductions (2013) is an unflinching record of a truly shocking crime in a very ordinary neighbourhood.

Captive is the first and only book (I know of) that is related to the Cleveland abductions but there is news that Michelle's memoir is going to be published in April 2014.

"I want to give every victim of violence a new outlook on life," said Michelle, "we shall define ourselves not as victims but as victors, and this will lead us to peace."

Amanda and Gina are also working on their book with Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan but no date has been announced for their book yet.

About the author:  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 fifteen years covering German-speaking Europe for newspapers, including The Times and the Mail on Sunday.  He is the author of some twenty previous books on crime and the paranormal, including the Penguin best-seller Monster (2008), an investigation into the life and crimes of Josef Fritzl, and Girl in the Cellar:  The Natascha Kampusch Story (2006).  He lives and works in Berlin.