For years, Karin Slaughter has been tantalizing us with bits and pieces of Will Trent's history. Followers of Slaughter's popular series know that Will is an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He is dyslexic, scarred physically and psychologically from years in an orphanage and on the streets, and barely made it out of his hellish childhood intact. An ill-advised marriage to a fellow orphan, Angie, has brought Will additional misery. Even though he is still Angie's husband, Will has fallen for pediatrician Sara Linton; Sara cares for him, as well, but she wonders if she can truly be close to a man who has so much emotional baggage. Slaughter's audience knows Sara intimately as a beautiful and brilliant physician and medical examiner who played a prominent role in earlier books.
In "Criminal," Slaughter tells her story in alternating chapters, some of which take place in 1974-75. In the opening scene, we meet a group of wretched female drug addicts. They are at the mercy of a brute who sells their bodies on the street and keeps most of the money they earn for himself. Nineteen-year-old Lucy Bennett started her habit when she took speed to lose weight. She graduated to "injectable amphetamine" and everything spiraled downward from there. Now, she feels as if "she'd swallowed a truckload of concrete" and her hair has been falling out in clumps. Her plight is particularly heartrending since she had once been a good student with a bright future. Now, she is just another streetwalker with dead eyes.
Slaughter places us squarely in Atlanta's underbelly: We witness the unspeakable torture and slaying of helpless women as well as the racism, sexism, and corruption that infected the city's police department in the mid-seventies. The changes that would eventually free women and African-Americans from years of subservience were just beginning.
At the heart of the novel is a shadowy and hulking figure who is obsessed with controlling the prostitutes whom he abducts. On his trail are twenty-five year old Amanda Wagner (Will's current boss) and her colleague, the "pushy and opinionated" Evelyn Mitchell. Both pound pavements, interview witnesses, and resolve to help those who have no one willing to fight for them. Their colleagues are mostly chauvinistic males who taunt and threaten them, but Amanda and Evelyn persist in doing their jobs under difficult circumstances.
This is a suspenseful, hard-hitting, and complex police procedural that provides a vivid portrait of a southern city in transition. Although the subject matter is often distasteful and depressing, Slaughter holds our interest by providing fragments of the truth but withholding the ways in which these fragments fit together. It is not until the final pages that the author ties up the story's dangling threads. "Criminal" is sordid, at times heavy-handed, and a bit drawn out, but it also a chilling, powerful, and poignant tale of hatred, revenge, insanity, compassion, and love.
In "Criminal," Slaughter tells her story in alternating chapters, some of which take place in 1974-75. In the opening scene, we meet a group of wretched female drug addicts. They are at the mercy of a brute who sells their bodies on the street and keeps most of the money they earn for himself. Nineteen-year-old Lucy Bennett started her habit when she took speed to lose weight. She graduated to "injectable amphetamine" and everything spiraled downward from there. Now, she feels as if "she'd swallowed a truckload of concrete" and her hair has been falling out in clumps. Her plight is particularly heartrending since she had once been a good student with a bright future. Now, she is just another streetwalker with dead eyes.
Slaughter places us squarely in Atlanta's underbelly: We witness the unspeakable torture and slaying of helpless women as well as the racism, sexism, and corruption that infected the city's police department in the mid-seventies. The changes that would eventually free women and African-Americans from years of subservience were just beginning.
At the heart of the novel is a shadowy and hulking figure who is obsessed with controlling the prostitutes whom he abducts. On his trail are twenty-five year old Amanda Wagner (Will's current boss) and her colleague, the "pushy and opinionated" Evelyn Mitchell. Both pound pavements, interview witnesses, and resolve to help those who have no one willing to fight for them. Their colleagues are mostly chauvinistic males who taunt and threaten them, but Amanda and Evelyn persist in doing their jobs under difficult circumstances.
This is a suspenseful, hard-hitting, and complex police procedural that provides a vivid portrait of a southern city in transition. Although the subject matter is often distasteful and depressing, Slaughter holds our interest by providing fragments of the truth but withholding the ways in which these fragments fit together. It is not until the final pages that the author ties up the story's dangling threads. "Criminal" is sordid, at times heavy-handed, and a bit drawn out, but it also a chilling, powerful, and poignant tale of hatred, revenge, insanity, compassion, and love.
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