Introduction
Sex crimes in the United States have soared to embarrassing numbers, from the harmless neighborhood peeping Tom, the incurable voyeur on up to the grisly murderers who consciously plot to rape their victims and perform heinous rituals over their maimed bodies. Horrible ...! Slap them away, you say, throw them behind bars and let them rot ... get their names off the front page of the paper, for Godsakes, and let people forget!
Not that simple. Their poison lingers, the venom still stings ... someone.
Amy Hanson, a young widowed nurse working in the Rehabilitation Ward of a Chicago hospital happens to be that unlucky someone in Edward Mitchell's thrilling novel studded with a colorful cast of characters-all men who have been convicted of sex crimes and are temporarily detained for psychological testing to ascertain the depths of their perversions. Curable or incurable?
In a sense, Amy is a prisoner of her own making, shrouding herself in a dark cocoon of lonely despair, irreversible and self-defeating, surrounding herself with the lowest ilk of male animals, afraid of looking for the good in men and suffering inevitable disappointment. The convicts' sexual taunts and tasteless comments never ruffle her steely grip, absorbing it all in blind acceptance.
Their contempt of her grows, seething, until one day an inmate decides to sluice up the boredom of institutional life and stages a conflict between himself and the reticent redheaded nurse whose untouchable womanliness was too great a temptation after six months of celibacy.
The Captive Nurse is not for those who cannot stomach blood or swallow the fact that in some circumstances, the female definitely is the weaker sex.
The Publishers