FRACTURED by Karin Slaughter
A few novels ago Karin Slaughter departed from her Grant County series of books and started a new series with TRIPTYCH. This book introduced the literary world to Will Trent, a member of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Now in her new novel FRACTURED, Will Trent returns.
What makes Trent so fascinating is how damaged he is. He grew up an orphan, living in a home where he waited and hoped to be adopted. To make matters worse he was dyslexic and had trouble with school work and in turn any type of social situation. He developed skills to hide his dyslexia and made his way into the world of police investigation.
Now he has found a way of life that keeps this shortcoming hidden. He uses computers and recorders to keep others unaware of his disability. On the social side he has a fiancé’ of sorts whom he loves and who loves him. She too is damaged by a life of abandonment. Still they have formed an alliance which works for them.
One day Will and his boss Amanda are summoned to a crime scene in Ansley Park, one of Atlanta’s most exclusive neighborhoods. There has been a murder committed at the home of a wealthy couple, and the murderer has been killed by the woman who lives at the house. Her teenage daughter was the murder victim.
As Will investigates the scene it soon becomes apparent there was more to this event than met the eye on initial viewing. A teenage girl is missing and a planned kidnapping may have occurred. Will is assigned to the case and Atlanta Police Department Detective Faith Mitchell is brought in as his partner.
In a Slaughter novel the crimes are fascinating but never as fascinating as the complexities of the characters. Will Trent is as unique a man as you could ever meet and his day to day living is difficult at best. Add to that an out of the ordinary crime and you have a man coping with insurmountable pressures. You always wonder when Trent is just going to collapse under the strain, but he keeps methodically plodding along.
The beauty of Slaughter’s writing is in the lack of predictability. You never know where a plotline is going to lead, or how a character is gong to act. It is all plausible, but never totally expected. There is one instance in FRACTURED where Trent gets a message from the father whose home was the crime scene. He wants to talk out his difficulties with Trent as they have a history. But Trent stops the message and we never know what this man would have said. This is Slaughter’s way of staying true to the characters rather than pandering to the readers’ needs. That is just one of the reasons she is recognized as a major talent in the field of writing crime thrillers.
FRACTURED, like all of Slaughter’s novels, is a book that grabs you from the get go. There is no slow transition into the plot. Things happen quickly and sharply and before you know it you are tearing through the pages, looking for clues and searching for answers. By the end of the book you have found most of that for which you were searching.
Karin Slaughter is a master writer. She knows her characters and she knows her plot. But it is the way she puts that knowledge down on paper that makes her stand out in a field of authors such as Michael Connelly, Jeffery Deaver, Patricia Cornwell and John Sandford. Her ability to shock, entertain and inform her readers makes her one of a kind.
Slaughter is always worth reading and she proves it again with FRACTURED.
FRACTURED is published by Delacourte Press. It contains 388 pages and sells for $25.00.