The Good Daughter

June 26, 2017
In the prologue of this gripping standalone from Thriller Award–finalist Slaughter (Pretty Girls), Zach Culpepper and an accomplice break into the Pikeville, Ga., home of attorney Rusty Quinn, who has become an unpopular figure for his advocacy on behalf of “outlaw bikers, drug gangs, and child killers,” as well as abortion clinics and unions. Ironically, Zach is someone Rusty has defended in the past. The thugs gun down Rusty’s wife and brutalize his teen daughters, Charlotte and Samantha. Samantha is shot in the head and buried alive, her fate left uncertain. Flash forward 28 years: Charlotte, now a lawyer, gets caught in a school shooting that claims the lives of the principal and a student. Charlotte spots a teenager wearing goth makeup holding a gun, but she believes something about the crimes doesn’t add up and investigates herself. Meanwhile, the shooting incident revives memories of the trauma that she and her family suffered years before. Slaughter keeps the twists coming, but some plot developments come at the expense of psychological depth. Author tour. Agent: Victoria Sanders, Victoria Sanders & Associates.

Starred review from August 1, 2017
Slaughter's latest break from the punishing travails of Dr. Sara Linton and Will Trent (The Kept Woman, 2016, etc.) uses a school shooting to reunite two sisters who've had compelling reasons for avoiding each other in the years since their own childhood horrors.Twenty-eight years ago, two masked men broke into attorney Rusty Quinn's Georgia home looking for the man of the house, the kind of lawyer who gives lawyers a bad name. In Rusty's absence, things went south instantly, leaving Gamma Quinn dead, her daughter Samantha shot in the head and buried alive, and her daughter Charlotte fleeing in terror. Sam somehow survived and rose above her brain damage to become a successful New York patent attorney; Charlie remained in Pikeville, joined the criminal defense bar, and married ADA Ben Bernard. But she and Ben have separated; she's taken solace in some quick sex with a stranger in a parking lot; and when she goes to the middle school where her one-night stand works as a history teacher to pick up the cellphone she left behind, she walks into the middle of a shooting that brings back all her own trauma. Goth girl Kelly Wilson admits she shot and killed Douglas Pinkman, the school principal, and 8-year-old Lucy Alexander, but Rusty, whose inbox is already overflowing with hate mail provoked by all the lowlifes he's defended, is determined to serve as her attorney, with Sam as a most unlikely second chair. In addition to the multilayered conflicts among the Quinns and everyone else in town, Sam, who urged her sister to flee their childhood nightmare, and Charlie, who's had to live with fleeing ever since, will have to deal with memories that make it hard for them to sit in the same room. It's hard to think of any writer since Flannery O'Connor, referenced at several key moments here, who's succeeded as consistently as Slaughter at using horrific violence to evoke pity and terror. Whether she's extending her franchise or creating stand-alones like this, she really does make your hair stand on end.

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Starred review from June 1, 2017
Slaughter stays true to form in her third stand-alone thriller (after 2015's Pretty Girls), not pulling any punches when it comes to the sordid things people are capable of inflicting on one another. As teens, sisters Charlie and Sam endured a living nightmare when a local hood, seeking revenge on their lawyer father, murdered their mother before marching the girls into the woods. Sam narrowly escaped being buried alive, while Charlie buried what happened to her deep inside. Nearly 30 years later, both women, now attorneys themselves, are fragile (Charlie, emotionally; Sam, physically) and estranged from one another. When Charlie gets caught in the middle of a school shooting, all hell breaks loose as the past catches up to the present, grim secrets are revealed, and the sisters come together to heal their wounds and their family. It's not hyperbolic to declare that Slaughter is a master of her craft. Her characterseven the secondary onesare deep and multifaceted, and here, the tightly packed story unfolds at a perfect pace that leaves readers frantically turning pages even as the harrowing violence within makes them cringe. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Slaughter routinely hits the best-seller lists and is a favorite of both librarians and patrons. She will disappoint neither with her latest.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)