Captive Bride

Captive Bride is a historical romance by the American writer Johanna Lindsey, published by Avon Books. It was one of the novels that established her as a writer of the kind of romance in which the setting is as important as the couple.

Christina Wakefield travels to the desert because the journey is offered to her and she wants to see something of the world, and the novel is candid about how quickly that curiosity becomes a trap. She is taken captive by Abu, a sheikh whose authority is absolute in the place she is now living, and the fact that she knew him previously in England, where he moved as Philip Caxton, is the detail on which the story turns. Most of the book is concerned with what she can do from a position of no power, and with what the man holding her wants: her family's money, the terms of a bargain, and a claim of his own. Lindsey wrote many novels of this sort, and the desert setting gives this one its rules about hospitality, ransom and the obligations that a captor is expected to observe.

The book belongs to a period in publishing when historical romances set outside Europe, and outside the marriage market, were a reliable part of the genre.