165. Fractured

Fractured by Karen Slaughter
Special Agent Will Trent, Book 2

Pages: 388
Finished: Oct. 18, 2008
First Published: July 29, 2008
Genre: thriller, mystery
Rating: 3.5/5
Reason for Reading: received a review copy from Random House Canada. Plus I've read all the author's books, this is her latest.

First sentence:

Abigail Campano sat in her car parked on the street outside her own house.

Comments: When I first started reading this book I thought it was a standalone but quickly realized it was the next book in a series which started with Triptych. The story starts with a woman arriving home and finding her door open and the window glass smashed. She thinks of her daughter and runs up the stairs but at the top of the stairs she sees a girl obviously murdered (presumably her daughter) and a man kneeling next to her with a knife in her hand. She screams and runs down the stairs, she falls down the stairs, the man follows, grabs her legs, she kicks him, gets on top of him and strangles him to death.

A very exciting start and things slowly unravel to not be as they first appeared. This was an enjoyable mystery with lots of turns in the plot and a satisfying solution. However, I expected more from a Karin Slaughter book. I'm used to using the word "gruesome" to describe her books and this was nowhere near that calibre which is somewhat a shame since the first book in this new series, Triptych, was an incredibly brutal and intricately woven story. I honestly felt that for some reason Slaughter was purposefully trying to tone down the stomach-turning details of her previous works and that is not what I expected.

The book ends on an obvious note that there will be more books in this series. The main characters from this book appear as minor characters in a few of her other Grant Country series books so I would suggest starting from the beginning with Karin Slaughter and read her books either by series or by the order in which they were published.

Overall, I enjoyed the crime, the detecting and the solving of the mystery. Though this is not Slaughter's best work, I still look forward to her next book and wonder with anticipation whether it will be a Grant County or Will Trent book.