When truth is as strange as fiction

A tragic case made the news a few years ago with the revelation that a young American woman, Kamiyah Mobley, had discovered she'd been abducted as a baby. It seems she'd harboured an inkling for a while that she may have been kidnapped. DNA tests subsequently proved that she was the baby abducted from a Florida hospital in July 1998 by a woman posing as a nurse. Gloria Williams, who is now in custody, brought her up as her own daughter, unbeknown to the man who believed himself to be the child's father.
 
The case caught my eye because it mirrors some of the events in my novel 'His Kidnapper's Shoes'. While Daniel is abducted as a young child, not a baby, and from his home rather than a hospital, other facts are similar. Laura Bateman brings him up as her own child, and the truth only emerges after Daniel reaches adulthood. Like Kamiyah, he has nursed suspicions that Laura may not be his biological mother, although his doubts stem from early childhood.
 
The original idea for 'His Kidnapper's Shoes' came from a conversation I had in 2010 concerning missing children. I put forward the opinion that most children who are kidnapped are taken by opportunistic predators. Someone else disagreed, saying that perhaps some are stolen by people unable to have children of their own. That makes sense when a baby is concerned, of course; it's believed Williams suffered a miscarriage a week before she kidnapped Kamiyah. A tragic set of events for all concerned.

Anyway, the conversation got me thinking. How would it feel to discover as an adult that you'd been kidnapped as a child? That the woman who you considered your mother was actually your abductor? From that seed the idea for 'His Kidnapper's Shoes' was born. Here's a taster:
 
On some deep level inside, Laura Bateman knows something is wrong. That her relationship with her son is not what it should be. That it is based on lies. But bad things have happened to Laura. Things that change a person. Forever.
 
For twenty-six-year old Daniel, the discovery that his mother is not who he thought comes close to destroying him. As his world turns upside down, he searches for sanity in the madness that has become his life. Daniel is left with nothing but questions. Why did Laura do something so terrible? Can he move past the demons of his childhood?
 
And the biggest question of all: can he ever forgive Laura?
 
A tense novel of psychological suspense, 'His Kidnapper's Shoes' weaves one man's quest for his identity with one woman's need to heal her troubled past.
 
You can buy the book from Amazon in e-book, audiobook or paperback format via this link: His Kidnapper's Shoes
 
 By a strange coincidence, round about the same time as I finished the first draft of the book,  another case came to light in America in which a young woman discovered she'd been kidnapped from hospital as a baby. A while back I blogged about novels based on real-life crimes. You can read the post here: Five Novels Inspired by Real-Life Crimes.

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