AS MOST journalists know, truth can be a lot stranger than fiction. There are some stories you'd be hard pressed to make up . . .

the downing of the twin towers or huge natural calamities such as the tsunami of Christmas 2004. Others are much more intimate and closer to home. These are the ones that most engage our imaginations.

One such is the tale of Natascha Kampusch, the 10-year-old Austrian girl snatched off the street by a sexual inadequate called Wolfgang Priklopil and held for eight years in a dismal little cellar under his suburban house in Strasshof.

The police . . . but not her parents . . . gave her up for dead. But Natascha lived, and in late August this year, managed to escape. Her captor's response was to throw himself under a Vienna-bound train. It's a strange and disturbing story, well told by Allan Hall and Michael Leidig. Although the book is what the trade calls "instant" it's fair to note both journalists had been tracking the story since the girl went missing in March 1998.

There is an eerie similarity between the upbringings of Kampusch and Priklopil.

Both were raised in homes that were, if not unhappy, certainly dislocated. The authors claim that she was a "latch-key kid" often left alone in her bleak council flat while her mother was out socialising. Priklopil was an only child who never got on with his bullying father, tried to dominate his mother, and found refuge in electronic gadgetry.

The authors argue (dubiously) that if Natascha hadn't learned to cope with her own harsh childhood she'd never have been able to survive in that tiny, squalid basement room in Strasshof, or hold her own against the captor who wanted to be called "master". Which raises the question: why didn't she make her escape sooner?

Kampusch has refused to answer any questions she regards as "intimate" but she has said "Wolfi" was no sex beast. "We had a tender relationship." She had to be persuaded not to attend his funeral, but she did go to the morgue to spend 10 minutes alone with his coffin. Whether she wept over it or spat on it nobody knows.

Like many such tales, it is now a moneymaking machine, tended by lawyers, accountants, agents and media advisers.

Austrian police are left embarrassed about having failed to track her down (despite having interviewed her captor) and the Austrian legal authorities are wondering what to do about a bizarre privacy law that stops the police investigating the shady sexual behaviour of Wolfgang Priklopil and his ilk.

Given that Kampusch made her escape less than four months ago, this book was plainly put together at high speed and is marred by some clumsy editorialising.

The authors frequently crank up the drama: "But time (for Natascha) was running out. Drawn inexorably towards the innocent-looking white van, unaware of the evil that sat waiting for her in it."

This is a very decent piece of work. The writers have covered the ground and asked the right questions. But they also leave questions hanging in the air, most of which can only ever be answered by Natascha Kampusch herself.