A young girl helps a man lure a kitten from underneath his car. It’s a ruse. She, Claire Fletcher, is the creature the man was after all along. For the next 10 years, she is his possession.

Each time he brought something I so desperately wanted, I had to remind myself not to feel grateful. He kept me so starved for even the smallest amenity that I could not see past the next privilege or what my deathly thin and battered body thought of as treats. I forced myself to focus on one thing: escape. Even when he slid the white cotton socks over my feet and my whole body shuddered with pleasure, I repeated the word like a mantra in my head so I would not lose sight of my ultimate goal—escape.

Escapeescapeescapeescape

Lisa Regan’s Finding Claire Fletcher—which Kirkus Reviews calls “a wonderfully written crime tale that favorably compares to the work of Michael Connelly, James Lee Burke, and Elmore Leonard”—is a taut, suspenseful drama that tells the story of the high-stakes rescue of Claire Fletcher, who was long ago presumed dead.

Detective Connor Parks, freshly divorced and facing an excessive-use-of-force trial, runs into “Lynn” in a bar and spends a night with her. Following the address the woman gave him, Parks learns Lynn is really Claire Fletcher, and a wild chase to track down her whereabouts and apprehend her captor begins.

It’s a story unfortunately borrowed from real events. Regan, who writes full-time from her home in Philadelphia, says she was inspired by the abduction and murder of the 11-year-old Minnesota boy Jacob Wetterling. “Every so often, especially on anniversaries, they would do stories about it, or it would be on Dateline, or it would come up in the press because his parents were still looking for answers,” Regan says.

She and Wetterling were about the same age, and so she couldn’t help but put herself in his shoes. “Every year of my life, knowing this was the age he would be, I was always thinking about him, and was he still alive? I thought, ‘What if someone ran into him in some really mundane scenario and had no idea they were talking to this person that had been abducted and had so many resources that had been expended to find him?’ ” 

One of the predominant themes that emerges in Finding Claire Fletcher is the shame the title character feels about not escaping when she had the chance. Though Fletcher’s abduction involved temporary shackling and routine physical abuse, her captor eventually allows her access to a car and even lets her find a job.

“What really struck me was that in the time I was writing and revising and looking for a home for the book, all these stories emerged about children who had been abducted and [were] still alive, and they’d been living with their abductor for years and had been too terrified to escape even when there was opportunity,” Regan says. “I thought to myself, ‘What would make you so terrified that even if you had an opportunity to escape the worst situation of your life, you were too afraid to do it?’ ”

Regan spoke to domestic violence survivors to get into the psychology of being abducted and victimized by an abusive person, which translates in Finding Claire Fletcher into what feels like an authentic representation of being captive. “Slowly over time, this person breaks you down, and you see this in the book,” Regan says. “When she first gets [abducted], she wants to escape and be free, and then pretty soon…she just wants to be warm, she just wants something to eat. So talking to domestic abuse survivors let me see that you start out as this whole person and then the abuser breaks you down…and you don’t realize where that’s happening.” 

Regan also delves into the aftermath of being abducted, which showcases that even though someone is physically free from their captor, psychological scars linger and impact how that person trusts loved ones and also how loved ones treat someone they thought was dead. Claire has to essentially forge a new relationship and rebuild trust with her sister, Breanna, who resents her for not leaving when she had the chance.

“I really wanted to show in the relationship between Breanna and Claire that nothing is easy. There’s wreckage and there’s an aftermath. It’s not like your relationships are going to be perfect after this. I had quite a few readers reach out to me and say…that [in] the aftermath part, where [Claire] is struggling with her sister and her family in general…I hit the nail on the head.” 

Regan, who earned a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in education from Bloomsburg University, spent years honing Finding Claire Fletcher. She says she hoped it would sell a few hundred copies; the book has since far outpaced her early goals.

“Finding Claire Fletcher was the first thing I wrote that I thought other people might enjoy reading,” Regan says. “When I first started, people in the business told me, ‘You’ll be lucky to sell 250 copies.’ At the time, I thought 250 copies would be fantastic, because I had nothing to base anything on. It went on in its first couple years to sell 30,000 copies. It’s sold 150,000 copies now….It was completely unexpected.”

Regan has since written a sequel, Losing Leah Holloway, which piggybacks on Claire’s compulsion to rescue victims of abduction. Regan has written 13 books in all, and her success is due to tight plotlines, immersive narratives, and a proven ability to build suspense. 

“That took years to get,” Regan says. “It’s just a constant process. You write something and then you have fresh eyes on it. You have other people looking at it and making suggestions, whether it’s a reader or other writers….I’m always looking for ways to get better.”

Matt Cortina is a journalist in Boulder, Colorado.