“His right knee was a bloody pulp. His ankle was shattered. The bottom half of his leg hung at an unnatural angle. Bone and sinew and muscle glistened in the light of the still-roaring flmes.”
Why, yes, ‘Slaughter’ IS her real name.
Pretty Girls tells the tale of three sisters: Julia, Lydia and Claire Carrol. Julia has disappeared years ago and has never been heard from again. Her disappearance has caused a rift in the family: parents Sam and Helen have divorced, and where Helen tries to pick up the pieces of her life and move on, Sam won’t let go and puts everything towards finding even the faintest trace of his lost daughter. Their other two children have chosen different paths. Lydia spent years as a drug addict, but has managed to clean up her act and runs a moderately successful business. She has a daughter, Dee, a clever girl on a scholarship, and a scraggly but sweet boyfriend named Rick. Claire, on the other hand, is married to successful architect Paul and, at the start of the novel, is at a bar, celebrating getting her court-ordered monitoring bracelet off her leg. When Claire and Paul leave the bar and go into an alley for some illicit groping, they are robbed, and Paul is stabbed. He dies in minutes. Claire is heartbroken, but – surprise – she soon discovers her husband wasn’t who he pretended to be all these years. She hooks up with her estranged sister to find out the truth.
There are a few authors whose work I buy as soon as it’s released. Karin Slaughter is one of these writers. I like her prose, her characters, the way her stories rise and drop in increasingly tense waves. I’m also hooked to her Grant County series, though by now they’re beginning to beg belief. I like Karin Slaughter. I’m not sure I liked this book, though. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but it fell a little flat for me. I didn’t think the characters were very convincing, for starters. Sam, whose diary entries are dispersed throughout the book, is sad and heartbroken and soon lapses into the stereotypical dad-talk of you-grew-up-so-fast and why-won’t-you-hold-my-hand-anymore, which is laid on so thickly that it begins to grate. Helen is little more than a convenient MacGuffin. Paul begs belief. Rick and Dee are, respectively, Rough But With a Heart Of Gold and Bratty Teen But Good Person In The Making. Lydia can’t seem to make up her mind about anything, though everyone keeps saying she’s headstrong and decisive, and Claire’s bad temper, which is clearly beyond her control, tends to flare up only at the most convenient moments.
Which isn’t to say the book doesn’t have its moments. Slaughter is good with plottwists and leads that seem important but ultimately don’t go anywhere and plans that don’t pan out, and the reader is pointed in the wrong direction several times. Creeptastic FBI agent Fred Nolan and gentleman serial killer Ben Carver are a hoot. Claire and Lydia’s sisterly bickering is funny and rings true. And it’s hard not to sympathise with Claire when she Tonya Hardings her tennis partner for suggesting rape victims had it coming for dressing all slutty, or to laugh at Claire and Lydia’s somewhat chilly reunion as they meet at the cemetery and Claire catches Lydia dropping her trousers to urinate on Paul’s grave. The long stretch in the middle is somewhat tedious, but it picks up its pace towards the end. Truth be told, this probably wasn’t a bad book.
But I am reminded of Slaughter’s previous outing, Cop Town, which focused on two women joining the Atlanta Police Force in the seventies. It’s meticulously researched, genuinely thrilling and the period take on crime lifts it way above standard thriller fare. Compared to Cop Town, Pretty Girls reads like a weak effort. There’s also Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know, which also deals with the grief of missing children, but doesn’t overdo the grieving dad schtick so much. Again, maybe my expectations were a little high, but Slaughter does better than this.
I will say this, though: Ms. Slaughter, write a stand-alone about Ben Carver and I’ll love you forever.
Note: this book will be published in July in the UK and in September in the US.
