Kidnapped

Maria Hammarblad

Average Rating 9/10 (1 Review)

It's a late winter night when Patricia Risden heads home in her car, on a road she's driven many times before. She doesn't have a care in the world, that is, until a man appears from nowhere, right in front of her.

The next thing she knows is being a prisoner of the unscrupulous Alliance Commander Travis 152; an intimidating man who demands information and complete cooperation. Travis soon realizes his mistake; Tricia doesn't know anything, and she is incapable of even getting a glass of water from the ship's computer.

Infamous for being a ruthless executioner, conditioned since childhood to feel nothing besides fear and pain, he still deems her harmless, and finds enough pity for the lost young woman to let her out of the cell; a decision that will change both their lives forever.

Review by Cathy Freeman (050910) Rating (9/10)

Review by Cathy Freeman
Rating 9/10
Patricia Risden is in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she almost collides with a man who appears from nowhere in the middle of the road. Her car slides off the road and flips on the roof, and she is rendered unconscious by the impact. When she wakes up again, she is on a spaceship, taken aboard by the Alliance Commander Travis 152.

He soon realizes that he has made a mistake, and he has to figure out what to do with her. As he says later in the book, "Tricia has the technical abilities of a stuffed toy," and since he deems her harmless, he lets her roam around the ship. Two people alone on a spaceship can only lead to one thing, and as Travis finds himself more and more intrigued with the young woman in his company, his lifelong allegiance to his employer, the faceless Alliance, is replaced with loyalty to her. Once they get together he is faced with a new problem; trying to find a way to get back to the relative safety on Earth.

Many science fiction writers tend to fill their books with long descriptions of complicated technical concepts. This author happily skips over the details of how the spaceship works, and focuses on the story instead. It makes for an easy read even for people normally not interested in this category of books. The story is easy to access, maybe a little slow in the beginning, but it picks up speed quickly. It's cute and romantic, and at times quite dramatic.

As cute as parts of it are with heroine curled up in the hero's lap and so on, romance isn't what will make this author famous. It's the bad guys and her willingness to write about things that make you flinch. I'm very fond of the Supreme Commander, Veronica, who takes an electric knife and saws someone's arm off to set an example. Perfectly wicked little details like that pulls the book up and places it a notch above the rest.
Cathy Freeman (5th September 2010)