A couple of years ago, the mass kidnapping of girls by Boko Haram militants in Nigeria made headlining news the world over. The trauma of parents not knowing what happened to their daughters is unimaginable.In patriarchal societies, if the kidnapped girl even comes back, she has trouble getting back into her society without carrying a stigma.

Emma Donoghue’s book and movie based on it --The Room-- was a chilling look at the life of a young woman (Brie Larson won the Best Actress Oscar) forced into sexual slavery, and her son born of rape, had its origin in a real life story of the Austrian man who imprisoned and repeatedly raped his own daughter.

Two recent books describe the anguish families go through when a child goes missing. It is worse when it’s a daughter, because of the horrible sexual assaults girls can be subjected to. Sometimes parents wish they get news of the child’s death, so at least they can grieve and find closure.

Karin Slaughter’s Pretty Girls is so horrifying that you can’t believe that a female writer thought up all those tortures on young women.

When nineteen-year-old Julia Carroll disappeared, her family fell apart. Her father, Sam, made it a mission to find out what happened to her, when the cops gave up.  His obsession destroyed his marriage and led to his suicide. The mother Helen Carroll kept Julia’s room as she left it, in the hope that she would return. Every time a girl goes missing, the Carrolls relive the trauma again. 

One of the sisters, Lydia Delgado, a single mother, went into a downward spiral of self-destructive behaviour. The only who remained relatively unscathed was another sister, Clair Scott, who had a happy marriage to architect Paul Scott. She is estranged from Lydia, who, in the past, accused Paul of molesting her.

Then, one evening Paul is murdered by muggers in the presence of his wife. When Claire starts looking into Paul’s things in his ‘man cave’ she discovers a bunch of snuff porn videos, that are so brutal that she is convinced by the investigating cop that they are staged for the sick pleasure of perverts.

She finds that her rich and outwardly caring husband had a secret side to him and she is devastated. The only person she can trust is Lydia, whom she hasn’t spoken to twenty years. Together they pick at the thread that could unravel the mystery of the missing girls, Paul’s involvement, and hopefully find out what really happened to their sister. They put themselves in danger, because the men involved are very powerful and would stop at nothing to prevent being exposed for their crimes.

The scenes of torture and killing are so graphic that they are enough to cause nightmares, and make one wonder about a society that breeds such beasts in the guise of men. 

In Find Her by Lisa Gardner, Flora Dane is a carefree student on a summer break in Florida when she is kidnapped by a sexual predator. It is inconceivable that any human being could do to another what the man subjects the young girl to. She is locked up in a coffin, starved, beaten and raped; then the man gives her food and water, turning Flora into a frightening case of Stockholm Syndrome. She feels so debased by this experience and convinced that her family has given her up for dead that she does not escape even when she can. Her abductor breaks her down completely, mentally and physically, till she is like a puppet controlled by him. It takes superhuman will to survive this ordeal for 472 days, and after she is rescued, she becomes a different person—fearless and hardened. What could possibly happen to her that is worse than what she already suffered? Her mother and brother put their lives on hold, hoping against hope that she would turn up alive, but the girl who was returned to them was just a shell of her former self. 

In Lisa Gardner’s disturbing thriller, Flora becomes a self-styled vigilante—deliberately putting herself into situations that would attract monsters like her captor, and she fights them. The last man was preyed on her, ended up burnt to death. A female cop, DD Warren in charge of the case – this is Gardner’s eighth Warren book—is caught in a bind. Can a murderer who deliberately posed as a victim be pardoned for her crime? Does her past agony give her license to kill?

Then, much to the shock of Warren and Samuel Keynes, FBI’s victim counsellor who had helped Flora come out of her trauma, she is kidnapped again. And this time the abductor is even crueler.

It is much more frightening to read Find Her than any horror story. Flora evokes equal parts admiration and dread. But the same question can be posed again—what kind of society creates such fiend?