OK, so here I am reading an eleven year old Karin Slaughter, third in the Grant County series. I read the second in the series sixteen months ago and gave it three stars so you can imagine pretty easily that I don’t remember or care what was happening then! Grab onto me Ms. Slaughter and make me want to read the next page! Dead body by the seventh page so that’s a start. Oh, yes, this is the coroner who is the ex-wife to the cheating chief of police in this small college town in Georgia. This is the price you pay for buying several used books in a series that seems interesting back when. Give it a chance, Larry! The story not only starts out with a fairly graphic description of the dead body but lots of evidence of emotional tension between various characters. Submerged emotions rampant and barely controlled. Then a second victim, not dead but badly injured, the pregnant sister of one of our primary characters. Lots to get the adrenaline going in the first dozen pages. OK. I’m in, Karin!Blood, guts, tension, uncertainty. And, since this is a series, we know something about the main characters and they are all present right at the onset. But what is going on? There is so much interpersonal tension between the characters that that the dead and damaged bodies almost fade into the background! Makes it more like a soap opera than a murder mystery.I am overwhelmed by the insistence of negative vibes between so many of the characters. The fifth body appears on day four of the novel. Lena, one of the regulars, seems to have an “assault me” sign on her back as she is subject to physical and verbal brutalization. The aggressive hostility between so many of the characters just wears me down.The conclusion is complex and therefore less than satisfying to me with lots of major loose ends that must be carried over to the next book in the series. Since I already have the next book on my shelf, I pull it out and plan to at least glance at it to see how some of these intense issues carry forward. So it has caught my interest but I am not happy about any of the characters at the moment. What is there to like about any of the main characters in this series, I want to know? Two stars. (That GR rating means: It was OK.) And both are because I am carried forward into the next book, kicking and screaming! But I am going to take a break with something hopefully less visceral and intense. Let's see if it takes me sixteen months to get to the next book!
Fear is a terrible thing. And the more commonplace, the more ordinary the setting for the fear, the more extraordinary it becomes.Karin Slaughter is a master of this subtle sinister art. She manages to write of terrible things in a simple, yet beautiful way.Sara Linton, paediatrician is also Grant County’s medical examiner. She lives in Heartsdale, small town USA. She is the heroine with problems, the children’s doctor who can’t have any of her own. She is divorced from police chief, Jeffrey Tolliver, who was unfaithful to her but she still has a relationship with him. Her pregnant sister, Tessa lives with her.She is called out to a crime scene, an apparent suicide on the local college campus. Tessa goes along for the ride. Nature calls and Tessa is forced to seek relief in the woods that adjoin the crime scene. She doesn’t return and Sara, along with Jeffrey, starts to worry. They find Tessa, stabbed, severely wounded and barely alive. Tessa is airlifted to hospital. She survives but her 8 month old foetus dies. Sara’s parents are devastated. Are these two incidents connected? Then the girl who found the body dies – another so-called suicide. By means of a shotgun placed between her feet and fired to blow off her face. Not a means of suicide usually used by a woman. Lena Adams, ex-police officer and security campus guard, doesn’t think it’s a suicide. Neither does Jeffrey. Sara finds out that the girl aspirated a tooth pre mortem. She was murdered. We’re drawn back into these character’s lives with an ease and familiarity that is too startling to breed anything other than admiration. Slaughter takes the mundane and makes it monstrous. She raises the stakes, places her credibility on the line and goes that extra mile that gives the reader that elusive aha moment. The moment that Thomas Harris gave us in Silence of the Lambs, Ian Rankin managed in Black & Blue and Boris Starling achieved in Messiah. Karin Slaughter knows how to write. She knows exactly where to leave you hanging and where to provide relief. She is undoubtedly the leader of the pack when it comes to female crime writers. Move over Sue Grafton, Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs. You don’t stand a chance against this aptly named author.
Do You like book A Faint Cold Fear (2004)?
Another great entry in the Grant County series. There were a few things I didn't quite buy (the "talking killer" at the end is never one of my favorite devices, and here it seemed especially "off"--why the killer confessed to that particular person at that particular time didn't ring true to me), but the story had a strong mystery at the center and plenty of twists and turns. The characters of Sara, Jeffrey, and especially Lena are all well-drawn, and for me are the reason this series is so compelling. Slaughter digs deeper into her characters than most suspense authors, and she gives them real flaws and complex motivations that draw you in and keep you turning pages to find out what they're going to do next.
—Dana Delamar
So I stayed up late, because this book was intense times ten! Sara is at the scene of a suicide when she discovers a member of her family is attacked. Things go from bad to worse when her suicide case turns out to be murder and more people start dropping like flies Everyone in this book is struggling with some sort of relationship crisis, which tends to add to the tension of the book. If the murder mystery wasn't top notch, I probably would have chipped away at the star rating for their idiot behavior. Lena is no longer on the force, but she's up to her neck in the investigation and making horrible decisions when it comes to the company she keeps. Jeffrey is pushing Sara for more and trying to "fix" Lena at the same time, which just makes a bigger mess of things. I wanted to thump all of the characters on the head to wake them up. Regardless, the surprises discovered during the investigation were literally jaw dropping and the last paragraph of this book blew me away. (view spoiler)[Did Lena really kill Chuck after all? Or did Ethan use her knife? (hide spoiler)]
—Becky ♡The Bookworm♡
Well, they do say "Practice makes Perfect" and I must say this was a vast improvement on the first two in the series.Most of the characters are intriguing. I seriously don't know what to make of them. Sara, Jeffrey, Lena ... especially Lena. No matter what Jill Rosen said, Lena had rules and one of them was that she never drank before eight at night.Was in Vegas recently and visited Jimmy Buffet's restaurant! It wasn't five o'clock there but it was somewhere!! "Ritalin, of course. His generation grew up on that. More Valium, lithium, amantadine, PXIL, Xanax ...Jeez, I am blessed with healthy children who never needed medications. Fingers crossed this will continue. "How about that?"Bit of a twist at the end... "C'mon Sara, what are we doing here?No fucking idea but y'all need to get your act together.
—Mo
