THE CAPTIVES

A literary psychological thriller that captures the binding power of the past and embarks on a desperate search for freedom and redemption.

Prison psychologist Frank Lundquist is astonished to see his high-school crush, Miranda Greene, walk into his officefifteen years later-- his newest,incarcerated,client.Though she doesn’t recall him, Frank remembers every word Miranda had spoken to him when she was the beautiful, long-haired teenage track star with the locker outside of the typing room. But why is Miranda, the daughter of the local Congressman, serving hard time in a maximum security prison for a brutal crime? And why does Frank, whose life is in the midst of unraveling after he lost his Upper West Side practice in a scandal, choose not follow protocol when he recognize Miranda and give up the case? One thing is clear: neither Miranda's past nor her present are free from dark secrets, and she is determined not to spend the rest of her life in Milford Basin State Correctional Facility. The son of a famous psychologist whose celebrated childhood intelligence test Frank was Patient Zero for, he is convinced the reunion was fated -- that he can save his own botched future by saving Miranda's. As his obsession deepens, and Miranda’s extreme plan to escape fails, their renewed acquaintance unleashes a wildly risky chain of events, with dire consequences.

Gripping and intelligent, with pulsingly real characters and a shockingly satisfying ending,THE CAPTIVES takes us behind the prison walls, where the only thing that haunts more than the past is the possibility of the future. Reminiscent of Susanna Moore’sIn the Cutor Jean Korelitz'sYou Should Have Known,and in the tradition of Tana French, DJ Marks’s THE CAPTIVES is a compelling exploration of sacrifice, manipulation, choice, and the potential for good and evil that sits in each of us.

DJ Marks, aka Debra Jo Immergut, has been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship and a Michener Fellowship and published a collection of short stories, Private Property, in 1992. Her stories also appeared in American Short Fiction and the Antietam Review. Immergut worked for many years as a magazine editor and journalist specializing in design and architecture. She was a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe, and was a winner of the National Magazine Award for editorial work. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and has taught writing in a variety of locations, including prisons in New York and Connecticut.