'Pieces of Her' by Karin Slaughter

From the BLURB: 

What if the person you thought you knew best turned out to be someone you never knew at all? 

Andrea Oliver's mother, Laura, is the perfect small-town mum. Laura lives a quiet but happy life in sleepy beachside Belle Isle. She's a pillar of the community: a speech therapist, business owner and everybody's friend. And she's never kept a secret from anyone. Or so Andrea thinks. 

When Andrea is caught in a random violent attack at a shopping mall, Laura intervenes and acts in a way that is unrecognisable to her daughter. It's like Laura is a completely different person - and that's because she was. Thirty years ago. Before Andrea. Before Belle Isle. 

Laura is hailed as a hero for her actions at the mall but 24 hours later she is in hospital, shot by an intruder, who's spent decades trying to track her down. 

What is Andrea's mother trying to hide? As elements of the past return and put them both in danger, Andrea is left to piece together Laura's former identity and discover the truth - for better or worse - about her mother. Is the gentle, loving woman who raised her also a violent killer?

'Pieces of Her' is the new stand-alone crime/thriller novel from maestra, Karin Slaughter! 

Much as I adored Slaughter's 'Grant County' series (until it tore my heart out!) and am still loving her 'Will Trent' series, I've been absolutely enamoured of her stand-alone books of late. Her last one, 2017's 'The Good Daughter' was an absolute SMASH and I loved it, so I was super keen to dive into her next with 'Pieces of Her'. 

Andrea and her mother Laura find themselves at an impasse - Andrea moved back home after a failed stint in New York, ostensibly to help nurse her mother back to health after her cancer diagnosis. But Laura is in remission now, and Andrea is still spinning her wheels living at home and taking a crappy job as a police phone operator - and reluctant to let her successful speech-therapist mother know just how much she hated her old life in New York, and is unwilling to return to it. 

There's a great line in which Andrea comments that her mother is a woman "who knows where the lids to her Tupperware are kept" and it's just *chef's kiss* apt character description for a put-together older white lady from the South. 

What changes everything is an incident in a diner, when Andrea and her mother find themselves bystanders in a gun attack. Except Laura isn't a bystander for long - she confronts the young gunman, and turns tables - killing him in a most violent, professional manner ... that multiple people capture on phone-camera, so she makes the nightly news. 

Suddenly Laura's world starts unravelling, and Andrea along with it. 

This set-up is VERY 'A History of Violence' meets the Geena Davis classic 'The Long Kiss Goodnight' ... or so I thought. I was kind of hoping that with this set-up, 'Pieces of Her' would become a mother-daughter cover-operative spy-thriller - but sadly, it becomes Laura sending Andrea off for her own safety, and having to uncover the truth of her mother's past by herself on the road, while Laura stays home and answers to the authorities. 

There are inter-cut flashbacks to Laura's past that keeps readers guessing as to *which* player she is in an unfolding Patty Hearst-esque saga from decades ago ... and I found these interchanges to be quite dull, and the backstory not nearly as thrilling as I'd hoped. Even as I also appreciated Slaughter portraying a nuanced though extreme form of domestic violence, of both physical, emotional and psychological abuse. 

I guess my disappointment came from Slaughter keeping this story relatively grounded, when I kept hoping/expecting it to take off into Jason Bourne type territory. I was also really gunning for a Mother/Daughter "buddy cop" recipe, because the book was most fun when Andrea and Laura were together - and I felt like the second Andrea went solo, the present-day storyline also became dull. I was especially disappointed when a potential relationship with a guy is dangled before Andrea, but it's stalled from really building by having them not team up ... and then that the entire thing ends with an almost Hannibal/Clarice talking scene, that after so little action felt like yet another lull in what should have been a more action-packed finale. 

There's a lot of similarities between 'Pieces of Her' and the (I think) more successful 'The Good Daughter' - namely in both books pivoting around a relationship from the past that's been buried, and re-triggered by a violent tragedy in the present. But 'The Good Daughter' was so pacey and violent, a deeply torturous psychological read that kept me guessing ... where I feel like 'Pieces of Her' kept stalling and never *quite* reaching its full potential. The story just never went the way I wanted it to, and remained sedate instead of kicking pace and characters up a notch. 

It was just 'okay' when I've come to expect 'spectacular' from Slaughter.

2/5

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'The Last Widow' Will Trent #9 by Karin Slaughter

From the BLURB:

The routine of a family shopping trip is shattered when Michelle Spivey is snatched as she leaves the mall with her young daughter. The police search for her, her partner pleads for her release, but it's as if she disappeared into thin air.

A month later, on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, medical examiner Sara Linton is at lunch with her boyfriend Will Trent, an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. But the serenity of the summer's day is broken by the wail of sirens.

Sara and Will are trained to run towards an emergency, not away from it. But on this one terrible day that instinct betrays them. Within hours the situation has spiralled out of control. And the fallout will lead them into the Appalachian mountains, to the terrible truth about really happened to Michelle, and to a remote compound where a radical group has murder in mind ...

‘The Last Widow’ is the ninth book in Karin Slaughter’s ongoing crime-thriller series, ‘Will Trent’.

It has been three years since we got a new ‘Will Trent’ instalment – and truth be told, last book ‘The Kept Woman’ didn’t quite tide me over satisfactorily. It read like a filler-book in the series, with little progress or advancement for the characters and their relationships – which is the whole reason I keep coming back to Slaughter, for the relationship of Will Trent and ‘Grant County’ expat, Sara Linton.

Well, I am happy to report that ‘The Last Widow’ left me a lot more satisfied – but also built my hunger and renewed my interest in this series overall, to the point where I know that I’m going to be painfully desperate for the tenth book  – which will probably be another three years coming!

Slaughter is very clever in how she sets up the parameters of this story – which hinges on an upcoming catastrophic event that none of our players know precisely what it is, only that it’s coming. There’s a countdown that the timeline hinges on, and from the get-go Slaughter uses it to set up the personal fractions and factions within the series world too.

We see a small window of time from both Sara and Will’s perspectives – the calm before the story – as they respectively deal with nuances in their relationship within an ordinary day. What’s brilliant is that we get the internals from both of them and see the same scene play out from both their perspectives – to realise that Will and Sara are currently out-of-step in their relationship, without even realising it. This is characterisation minutiae, and it’s Slaughter at her absolute best – because these small details will echo throughout the book, until they become loud as church-bells by the end.

From there, the book picks up a frenetic pace and a chilling whodunit – the crux of which I don’t want to give too much away, because it’s a great premise and plot for the entire book. You’d think a storyline like this when Will and Sara are on rocky ground, would further fracture them for readers but it actually does the opposite – solidifying their relationship, and what’s to come in the series.

I’ll only say that ‘The Last Widow’ is a book of the times. Slaughter has done her research – as always – but in doing so she’s looked into the dark-heart of the current American political and social climate, and it’s nor pretty. This book deals with Neo-Nazi’s, domestic terrorism and homebred militia. It’s honestly one of the most frightening scenarios and back-stories Slaughter has hit on in recently memory, for the very fact that it feels uncomfortable contemporary;

From what Faith could tell, most of the men were just looking for a reason to camp out, get away from their wives, and pretend they were more important than their actual lives as accountants or used car salesman would indicate. The more dangerous factions were steeped in the theories of the Posse Comitatus, who believed that the government should be violently overthrown and returned to white Christian men.
Apparently, they lacked access to photographs of the majority of the United States Congress, the president, the cabinet, and most of the judges packed onto state and federal courts.

Amidst all this are Sara and Will, caught up in these factions with far-right extremists – though I won’t say how. I will however, say that what Slaughter illuminates on the true-background of such groups is terrifying. And it essentially boils down to; war breeds home-grown terrorists. There is a direct correlation, in fact, between white nationalist domestic terrorists and those with US military-backgrounds; men who come home from war feeling disenfranchised, broken, and discarded by their government – who have seen up close how grassroots terrorist organisations work from their fighting abroad, then apply those “lessons” to their own disillusionment and anger. And the fact that the US Government knows about this correlation – a comprehensive report was gathered in 2009, but “conservative politicians and media outlets jumped on the report,” the backlash was so severe DHS publicly apologized for the report and dismantled the team responsible for tracking far-right threats.

This is the breeding ground for bad-guys in ‘The Last Widow’, and it sees Sara go toe-to-toe with a Neo-Nazi militiaman;

She asked, “You ever notice how George Clooney never goes around telling people how handsome he is?”
Dash raised his eyebrows, expectant.
“It makes me curious – if you’re really a patriot, do you have to put it in your name?”
Dash chuckled, shaking his head. “I wonder, Dr. Earnshaw, if I was a writer, how would I descrive you in a book?”
Sara had read books by men like Dash. He would list the colour of her hair, the size of her breasts and the shape of her ass.

There are so many little asides throughout this book, when Slaughter absolutely goes to town on the likes of khaki-clad Charlottesville Nazis, and media pundits who think racism should be given parity. It’s delicious, sinister, sometimes overwhelming but so very accurate as to be remarkable. This is Slaughter at the top of her game – taking the real world and distorting it with just enough truth to make the crime-thriller notes that most more astute.

‘The Last Widow’ was an absolute thrill from beginning to end – but the characterisations within are also bang on, and the best they’ve been in the ‘Will Trent’ series for a while now (certainly since Sara and Will solidified their romantic relationship.)

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This is Karin Slaughter at her very best, and I just want more.

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'The Good Daughter' by Karin Slaughter

From the BLURB:

'Karin Slaughter's most ambitious, most emotional, and best novel. So far, anyway.' 

—James Patterson

The stunning new standalone, with a chilling edge of psychological suspense, from the bestselling author of Pretty Girls.

Two girls are forced into the woods at gunpoint. One runs for her life. One is left behind ...

Twenty-eight years ago, Charlotte and Samantha Quinn's happy smalltown family life was torn apart by a terrifying attack on their family home. It left their mother dead. It left their father - Pikeville's notorious defence attorney - devastated. And it left the family fractured beyond repair, consumed by secrets from that terrible night.

Twenty-eight years later, and Charlie has followed in her father's footsteps to become a lawyer herself - the archetypal good daughter. But when violence comes to Pikeville again - and a shocking tragedy leaves the whole town traumatised - Charlie is plunged into a nightmare. Not only is she the first witness on the scene, but it's a case which can't help triggering the terrible memories she's spent so long trying to suppress. Because the shocking truth about the crime which destroyed her family nearly thirty years ago won't stay buried for ever ...

***

‘The Good Daughter’ is the latest novel from my favourite crime-writer, Karin Slaughter.

The last Karin Slaughter book I read was 2016’s ‘The Kept Woman’, eighth book in her long-running ‘Will Trent’ series which in recent books has become a convergence of her previous series, ‘Grant County’. I enjoyed ‘The Kept Woman’, but also struggled with it in a way I haven’t done with a Karin Slaughter book before … and a lot of the struggle was a feeling of series-stagnation, a sense that Book No. 8 was a bit of a “filler episode” with little happening to advance characterisation. Which basically boils down to a bit of fatigue for a series that is, essentially, 14-books long by now.

So I was somewhat happy to come to ‘The Good Daughter’, and realise it’s a stand-alone book. Even though by the end of it, I did find myself half-hoping that Ms. Slaughter would announce this as the first in a new series she’s about to kick off (which, hey!, isn’t that wild a possibility – since her 2014 novel ‘Cop Town’ was meant to be stand-alone and is now rumoured to become the first in a series!).

‘The Good Daughter’ revolves around sisters Charlotte ‘Chuck’ and Samantha ‘Sam’ Quinn – and their small hometown of Pikeville, Georgia. Twenty-eight years ago Chuck and her older sister Sam were the victims of an awful act of vengeance aimed at their notorious defence attorney father, that resulted in the death of their mother and left both girls with very different scars. We begin in 1989 and the awful events of one night, an event readers will keep pivoting to and see from both Sam and Chuck’s perspectives – then we land in 2017, when the sisters have not spoken to one another for close to a decade, even as they’ve chosen very different paths for themselves, while still following in their father’s lawyering footsteps.

A school-shooting forces the sisters to come together, for their father’s sake, and the young woman accused of the heinous act which has left two dead.

I have not been a very good reader this year (let alone reviewer!). I have been reading, but mostly manuscripts and Top Secret projects I can’t exactly blog about. And so I have felt very much deficient as an avid reader in 2017, with only a meagre number of *published* books completed from my towering TBR-pile. But Karin Slaughter has changed that, thanks to the compulsively brilliant ‘The Good Daughter’. I feel a little unlocked now, and it’s no wonder when Slaughter is one of those mainstay authors whom I have come to rely on as a constant reading lodestone at least once a year.

‘The Good Daughter’ is a fabulous introduction to Slaughter’s crime novels, for those who have never come across her before. Even as this stand-alone novel is quite a different beast from her usual crime-dramas … it’s much more a family-saga than anything else she’s written, with a firm focus on the love between the two sisters and their complicated relationship with their charming, slippery father, Rusty. Slaughter’s previous books have all tended to be focused on the prosecution side of things too – with a police chief, FBI-agent and coroner making up her usual list of protagonists – but ‘The Good Daughter’ switches things up brilliantly, by aligning us with the defence-attorney team on the side of the accused, and painting small-town cops in a none too flattering manner … These are all thoroughly new avenues that Slaughter is exploring, but it’s all still an amalgamation of what makes Karin Slaughter the top of her game.

I will warn that, yes, like most crime writers of today – violence against women is a huge component of this book (and most of Slaughter’s works, even as male characters also get dealt their fair share of violence). What I appreciate about Slaughter though, is that it’s not for nothing. The physical and sexual violence meted out against her female characters is never used to advance a man’s storyline – and it’s never so throwaway that she doesn’t pick apart, to the bone, the ramifications of that violence beyond the act itself.

As is always the case, Slaughter’s characters are broken. Not just by the past, and a collective, harrowing and violent event from Sam and Chuck’s childhood – that changed their young lives’ forever – but they’re broken in more recent grief of loss, and marriage-breakdowns. Sam and Chuck are messy, and it’s easy to see why, when we meet their enigmatic father Rusty who – for all his caricature bluster and good-nature, is just as hollowed-out as his daughters by all that they’ve lost. Rusty reminded me more though, of a stone – smoothed by being battered and washed over by the current of time, while his two daughters are still jagged rock formations, not yet ready to face the waves. Even Slaughter’s minor-characters are sublimely drawn and you just know that if she wanted to (again, I’m crossing my fingers for a series here) there’d be some fantastic stories to pluck out of them … Rusty’s secretary Lenore, being a prime example.

I will say too though – that something which struck me as so different about ‘The Good Daughter’ from Slaughter’s other books is how likeable all the main players are. I know how this sounds but trust me, – some of Slaughter’s long-time readers (me included) take serious issue with some of her protagonists (*cough* Lena Adams *cough*). Sometimes it’s an enduring hatred, other times what starts as hate-of-a-thousand-suns cools over a series as their layers are peeled back … but pretty generally, Slaughter loves a character who lives in the gray-areas of morality, and whom readers have to really work at begrudgingly liking. To give you a teaser of this (which spoils nothing, because you learn it in the first chapter or two of book one!) is that hero of the ‘Grant County’ series, Jeffrey Tolliver, cheated on the series’ other protagonist, Sara Linton and when we meet them they are bitterly divorced.

This kind of ingrained dislike of awful, damaged characters isn’t really a factor in ‘The Good Daughter’. Chuck and Sam certainly have their issues – Chuck especially, lives with more than one moral ambiguity. But you don’t hate them. At least, I didn’t. Instead I felt an instant kinship and tenderness towards both of them – also, possibly, because we first meet them as children, experiencing the worst moment of their lives. Perhaps we’re made to be instantly forgiving for some of their more caustic behaviour because we know where it stems from … but I don’t think so. At least, that’s not the only reason. I think Slaughter has just really excelled at writing two damaged but determined women who are fascinating to read bump against one another’s so different personalities, and find a way to connect as sisters after such a long silence.

‘The Good Daughter’ is, unsurprisingly, one of my fave readers of 2017 so far. It may even be pretty high up on my list of All Time Favourite Crime Novels. A heart-hurting slice of Georgia dark, from a crime-writer who has managed to pivot into family drama with such fine characterisations, that I find myself in awe of an author I already considered a favourite. I will only say that I’d have liked more courtroom drama – but I’ll quietly hope we get more, should this book prove to be the first in a series …

5/5

  

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'The Kept Woman' Will Trent #8 by Karin Slaughter

From the BLURB:

A body is discovered in an empty Atlanta warehouse. It's the body of an ex-cop, and from the moment Special Agent Will Trent walks in he knows this could be the most devastating case of his career. Bloody footprints leading away from the scene reveal that another victim - a woman - has left the scene and vanished into thin air. And, worst of all, the warehouse belongs to the city's biggest, most politically-connected, most high-profile athlete - a local hero protected by the world's most expensive lawyers. A local hero Will has spent the last six months investigating on a brutal rape charge.

But for Will - and also for Dr Sara Linton, the GBI's newest medical examiner - the case is about to get even worse. Because an unexpected discovery at the scene reveals a personal link to Will's troubled past. The consequences will wreak havoc on his life and the lives of those he loves, those he works with, and those he pursues.

But Sara's scene-of-the-crime diagnosis is that they only have a few hours to find the missing woman before she bleeds out . . .

‘The Kept Woman’ is the eighth book in Karin Slaughter’s addictive crime series, about Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) officer, ‘Will Trent’.

This book follows on from the seventh, ‘Unseen’ in which Will and his girlfriend Sara Linton went through the fallout of a tough investigation, only to come out stronger and more committed in their relationship. Sara is the doctor/medical examiner from Slaughter’s original ‘Grant County’ series, and she’s the widow of that series’ protagonist, Jeffrey Tolliver. But Sara’s past and grief over Jeffrey has really been the smallest hurdle in her and Will’s new relationship – namely because Will is actually married, to his long-time friend and psychological torturer, Angie Polaski.

Will and Angie met as children in the crooked foster-care system; they suffered through extraordinary abuse at the hands of various foster parents and fellow children. Will and Angie both went on to become cops – Angie a bad cop, and Will as in all things, one of the good guys. Angie has been Will’s longest and steadfast friend, but she’s also his torturer – she knows all his weak spots, and she exploits them for her own gains in their twisted relationship. And Angie’s been working overtime lately, since Will and Sara started dating some eighteen months ago …

But when this book kicks off, it’s at a murder scene with at least two missing bodies – one of which has all signs pointing to Angie Polaski – thus forcing Will to confront the very idea he’s been secretly harbouring for most of his life; that his wife might really be dead, and out of his life for good.

Ok. So. I love Karin Slaughter and my love is well-documented. The last ‘Will Trent’ book we got was in 2013, so I have been ridiculously excited for ‘The Kept Woman’ – especially after Slaughter revealed early on that this book would feature the mysterious and merciless, Angie. And while I was reading I really was like a pig in muck; enjoying every second of this world and Slaughter’s writing that I’d been sorely missing for three years. But, but, but … when I got to the end, I really did have a moment of reflection on how this book impacts the characters overall going forward – and I came to the realisation that it really doesn’t. ‘The Kept Woman’ doesn’t change much of anything for the characters – and there was more emotional upheaval at the end of ‘Unseen’. That means ‘The Kept Woman’ has the tinge of a “filler-book” for me; with a lot of bells and whistles happening in the plot to make us feel like we’re moving toward some horrible, inevitable tilting, but by the end not a lot changes. Everything pretty much stays the same for the players in this game.

On the one hand – maybe maintaining a status-quo might be okay for the eighth book in a series (especially when we don’t know exactly how many books Slaughter has planned in this series? We may be only at the mid-way point?!) Sara Linton migrating from ‘Grant County’ to ‘Will Trent’ was a big shake-up of its own early on, and then her falling for Will was a huge development for both characters. But I do get worried when Slaughter keeps her characters (and readers) in a semi-decent stagnant space by the end of a book. We all know what happened in ‘Beyond Reach’ once Jeffrey and Sara reached that point, right?

So – yes – on the one hand ‘The Kept Woman’ let me down a little bit, because nothing really changes. Even some pretty big revelations that come to the surface won’t actually impact characters too much going forward … And it’s always a little sucky to get to the end of a 548-page book and think “Huh, we’re exactly where we started.”

But what I did admire in this book was Slaughter examining rape and sexual assault cases through the lens of media and stardom. There’s a case that Will has been working in this book, about an NBA star who is accused of violently raping and beating a drugged woman – Will was the lead investigator, taking the case through to trial … where he discovered his client’s background trashed the jury’s perception of her, witnesses were paid off or intimidated, and the whole thing fell apart. And all because the accused rapist – Marcus Rippy – is a multi-million dollar cash-cow for his sports agency.

Rippy’s case allows Slaughter to make some uncomfortable truths and shine a harsh light on how such cases play out in the glare of media spotlight and the ruthless court of public appeal. And what’s even more unsettling is how much the Rippy rape case mirrors real examples – like Kobe Bryant’s 2003 rape case, that established a new and nasty legacy for women trying to report against powerful and moneyed men. Even see what’s been happening to Amber Heard after she reported Johnny Depp for domestic violence abuse – a single photo appears of her smiling(HOW DARE SHE?!) and suddenly people think it’s an open and shut case of a gold-digger versus a rich megastar. Slaughter really goes to town on these notions, and it’s both nauseating and eye-opening;

Will didn’t respond, because there was nothing else to say. 

Faith gripped the steering wheel. ‘I have rape cases. You don’t throw a murder case to a jury and they ask, “Well, was the guy really murdered or is he lying because he wants the attention? And what was he doing in that part of town? And why was he drinking? And what about all those murderers he dated before?”’ 

‘She wasn’t sympathetic.’ Will hated that this even mattered. ‘Her family’s a mess. Single mom with a drug habit. No idea who the dad is. She had some drug issues in high school, a history of self-cutting. She was coming off academic probation at her college. She dated around, spent a lot of time on Tinder and OkCupid, like everybody her age. Rippy’s people found out she had an abortion a few years ago. She basically wrote their trial strategy for them.’

One more reason why ‘The Kept Woman’ didn’t sit overly well with me was that Sara Linton didn’t read … like herself in this book? She’s very much in a back-seat role, which I didn’t appreciate – but also her reactions felt, off? I know lots of people read ‘Grant County’ and now ‘Will Trent’ and thoroughly dislike Sara Linton. I’ve read it said that she’s a bit of a Mary Sue. I never felt that way – but in this book I did find her getting on my nerves, especially when Will’s life is being thrown off-kilter and he’s experiencing intense grief and Sara pretty much just wants him to get over it because Angie was a terrible human-being and he has her now. Yeah, there was just something tonally off about Sara and her reactions in this book? Also that she was relegated to the periphery.

I love Karin Slaughter, and while reading ‘The Kept Woman’ I did enjoy the ride. But upon reflection this books feels … stagnate. In a series where there’s been so many twists, turns and shake-ups, you really notice when one book makes a big show-and-dance about not actually advancing the story and players. It just sucks that I’ll probably be waiting another three years for the next instalment, and living in hope that these characters I’ve grown to love start marching forward with a bit more determination.

3/5

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