So hot in the heels of a great read James Rollins’ Bloodline, Book 18 for 2012 Karin Slaughter’s Criminal may be even better. The book is the seventh in the Atlanta series featuring Will Trent and Sara Litton. I’ve written before that I put off reading the first book in this series Triptych for a long time because I loved the Slaughter’s Grant County series so much I didn’t think that this one could match up! Silly me! After a couple of books in this series the two series merged (for reasons not discussed here) and since then the series has been wonderful!
This book is set both in current time and flashes back to Atlanta in 1975, when Amanda Wagner, Will’s current boss at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) and his partner Faith Mitchell’s mother Evelyn were working their first case, while they were members of the Atlanta Police Force. The case involves missing, prostitutes, a murder of another prostitute who is miss identified by the missing girl’s brother!! In the present time Will Trent faces demons from his past when a college girl is reported missing, and Will discovers his father has been released from prison after serving 30 years! Will is convinced that the abduction of the missing girl is the work of his father and Amanda agrees. Soon the two cases are intertwined and the reader learns the secrets of Will’s past and his connection to Amanda.
The reason that I love Karin Slaughter’s work is that she pours her heart and soul in the characters that inhabit her books. While the story lines are always great ,it’s the characters that make the stand out from the crowd. In Criminal, Slaughter outshines herself, as we learn about: the prejudices that Amanda and Evelyn overcame to be accepted as police officers, the demons of Will’s past as he faces what and who his father and mother were, the ever developing relationship between Will and Sara and the continuing relationship between Will and his estranged wife Angie, that was forged in the orphanage where they grew up! Wow! All that in 428 wonderful pages!!
So check it out!!