October 2008

Fractured

Karin Slaughter

Best-selling novelist Slaughter is most well known for her Grant County series, but here she follows up on the characters introduced in Triptych (2006). Will Trent, of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, needs a GPS system to find his way to the crime scene in Ansley Park, one of Atlanta's oldest and wealthiest suburbs. Once on the scene, however, he is the only one to intuit the true specifics of the case, much to the irritation of the Atlanta PD. Suburban mom Emily Campano, returning home early, finds the severly beaten body of her teenage daughter, Emma, and instinctively attacks the seeming perpetrator, stragling him. Will soon discovers, however, that the dead teen is not Emma but her best friend. He is charged with heading up the investigation into Emma's kidnapping and saddled with a partner from the Atlanta PD, an officer who has her own reasons for hating him. Possible motives and suspects abound as they home in on the girl's posh private high school, a veritable cauldron that mixes cruel social climbing with sexual manipulation, among both the faculty and their pupils. As Will makes headway on the case, he must also struggle to compensate for his severe dyslexia, smooth the tensions with his new partner, and hide the emotional scars of a childhood spent in an orphanage.