“Southern Cheap is, I’m gonna eat stale cookies while I serve you these fresh, warm buttered biscuits. Yankee Cheap is, I’ve got ten million dollars in the bank but I’m gonna cut off the thermostat during a blizzard and here’s my great-great-grandpa’s mothballed coat from the War of 1812 if you don’t have the character and fortitude to generate your own body heat.”

I meant to read this back in August when it came out, but I couldn’t make the timing work (I even read the first book in the series in prep, though I didn’t review it). I finally got around to it, and I really liked it! I’m definitely reading more Karin Slaughter books (these two books were my first of hers). You can read this book on its own if you don’t want to bother with reading the first Andrea Oliver book, Pieces of Her. But I don’t recommend it. The emotional beats and several plot points will make more sense and hit way harder if you have read that first book.

This book picks up two years after the end of the first one, with Andy fresh out of Glynco, the US Marshal training academy. Her anti-cop, anti-authority mother is not happy about this development. And neither is her ex-boyfriend, also a US Marshal.

I’m sorry, quick break to post this gif.

Anyway, because of stuff that happened in the first book, Andy is rushed straight from graduation to her first assignment, because a certain someone is up for parole, and another certain someone thinks that if Andy can prove they committed a murder (an unsolved murder 40 years old) they can shore up the case against them and they will never get out of prison.

This leads Andy to the small town of Longbill Beach, where she is ostensibly there to protect a federal judge, but really is there to solve the murder of the judge’s teenaged daughter, who was seven months pregnant at the time of her death (the baby lived, don’t care if that’s a spoiler). The book then alternates between flashbacks of Emily’s life in the six months leading up to her death, and Andy in the present day working to solve her murder.

I actually really enjoyed this. Domestic thrillers are hit or miss for me (and more miss than hit), but give me a good murder investigation and I am a happy camper, especially if the investigator has personal stakes in the investigation. The details in this one were just as satisfying as they were in her first book, and the ending was good. I know Karin Slaughter has a reputation for violence and tough subject matter, but this one was on the more mild end of that spectrum (for a book that features the murder of a pregnant girl).I’m interested to see just how dark and gory she can get, though. I found a copy of Pretty Girls at my local Friends of the Library sale over the summer so that one will probably be next!