Kidnappers: A Love Story

Description

Diane Simmons

Kidnappers: A Love Story

ISBN: 978-1-956921-75-5 (pbk.)

(April 6, 2027) 

It’s May of 1935, the depths of the Great Depression; millions are out of work and desperate. Meanwhile the country has been riveted by the Lindbergh kidnapping. And now the newspapers report that the country is in the grip of a terrifying kidnapping “epidemic.”

For criminals, however, the new crime is a godsend. Repeal of Prohibition has meant that bootlegging—which sustained so many for so long—is dead. And bank robbery isn’t what it was in the days of Bonnie and Clyde; most banks are now fortified and heavily armed. So for the three real-life criminals upon whom this book is based, kidnapping one of Seattle’s timber magnates seems like the perfect way to get the money they need. Sure, they’ve heard of Hoover’s new FBI, but they figure it’s mostly hype.

In this energetic, entertaining and poignant novel, Diane Simmons explores the lives of a little gang of would-be kidnappers: seventeen-year-old Maggie who is the sole support of her destitute parents’ ever-expanding family; her handsome, lazy, possibly sociopathic husband Hap; and Bill, a life-long criminal with a good heart and a modest proposal for funding a respectable life. But when Hap impulsively abducts the wrong target—Kate, a mill-owner’s spirited and left-leaning daughter—the scheme unravels, and the four of them are on the lam through the Depression-era American West with its grifters and sex workers, its orphanages and Hoovervilles. Through it all you can’t help rooting for the kidnappers….

—Meredith Sue Willis, author of Saving Tyler Hake, Out of the Mountains.

Hapless and tenderhearted gangsters populate Diane Simmons’ new book, Kidnappers: A Love Story. It’s a page turner, as much for its twisting plot as for its history of American hard times.

—Fatima Shaik, author of Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood.

With Kidnappers: A Love Story, Diane Simmons bookends Richard Ford’s Canada on the hopes and dreams of small time criminals in the West.

—Roe Wall, author of During-the-Event.