Criminal

May 28, 2012
At the outset of Slaughter’s tense fourth thriller to combine characters from her two crime series (after 2011’s Fallen), life is running smoothly for agent Will Trent of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation as he eases into a new relationship with Dr. Sara Linton, until the abduction of 19-year-old college student Ashleigh Snyder. When his GBI mentor and boss, Deputy Director Amanda Wagner, specifically tells him to stay away from the case, Will knows something is wrong. Flashback to 1975, when Amanda is a rookie in the Atlanta Police Department, along with Evelyn Mitchell, who later becomes the mother of Faith, Will’s GBI partner. The APD at that time is rife with racism and sexism, but Amanda and Evelyn refuse to abandon the case of several missing prostitutes, despite warnings from other (male) detectives to back off. Slaughter seamlessly shifts between past and present, while her usual attentive eye for character and carefully metered violence is on full display. 6 to 8–city author tour. Agent: Victoria Sanders, Victoria Sanders & Associates.

June 15, 2012
Now that Slaughter has put former Grant County Medical Examiner Sara Linton (Broken, 2010) and Faith Mitchell, of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (Fallen, 2011), though hell, it's GBI Deputy Director Amanda Wagner's turn on the hot seat, in a jolting case that involves murders separated by 40 years but united in ugliness. Georgia Tech sophomore Ashleigh Snyder has gone missing. The case is a natural for endlessly troubled GBI agent Will Trent, but for some reason Amanda, though she's directed every other available agent to search for Ashleigh, is keeping him off the case. Not only has she banished Will to the airport in a dead-end patrol of men's rooms, he also finds her hanging around the Techwood apartments, geographically close to Ashleigh's place but economically a million miles away. How come? Amanda's motives are rooted in the murder of Jane Delray (or was it Lucy Bennett, as Lucy's brother Hank insisted?) back in 1975, the year Will was born and Amanda was cutting her teeth in the GBI. Shuttling back and forth between that fateful summer and the present, Slaughter links the murder of a prostitute you'd think would have been long forgotten to the fate of Ashleigh Snyder. As per usual in this explosive series, the darkest revelations involve recurring characters. Yet the narrative arcs of the regulars continue to fascinate because Slaughter's not afraid to put them through irreversibly life-changing situations. However successful you find the dizzying alternation between present and past nightmares, this double-barreled load of horrors is the clearest indication yet that Slaughter, like the sage of Yoknapatawpha, is less concerned with the shape of individual novels than with her sprawling, multivolume saga as a whole.

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February 1, 2012

Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Will Trent would like finally to make his life more than just work. But no such luck with a crime from 1975 suddenly making trouble today. Slaughter can of course be lauded as a No. 1 international best-selling author and ITW Silver Bullet Award winner and the guiding light behind the Save the Libraries campaign. Buy multiples.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2012
The fourth entry in Slaughter's Georgia series moves between 1975 and the present day. Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Will Trent is livid when his boss, Amanda Wagner, keeps him off their latest case. But Amanda has her reasons, and they go back to the 1970s, when Amanda and Evelyn Mitchell were rookies and among the first women hired in the Atlanta Police Department. Despised by their male colleagues, they are treated with the utmost disdain. Sent to take a rape complaint at Techwood Homes, a roach-infested housing project, the two discover that three prostitutes have gone missing, and no one seems to care. Amanda, who still cooks and cleans for her father, a longtime police commander, at first thinks that Evelyn, who is quick with a retort, is somewhat scandalous, but the two bond over their increasingly dangerous investigation, which is continually being stymied by both cops and criminals. And what they discover about what has been done to the missing prostitutes fuels their ire and their ambition. Providing a fascinating backward glance at sexual politics in the workplace as well as a grisly look at a brutal sexual predator, Slaughter delivers another riveting, pulse-pounding crime novel. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: National media attention, including a tie-in with the Save the Libraries campaign, will help launch author Slaughter's twelfth thriller onto the best-seller lists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)