PIECES OF HER by Karin Slaughter
It’s summertime and the reading is easy, at least when you are savoring every delicious word of Karin Slaughter’s latest novel PIECES OF HER. It is easy reading because it is so well written. You fly through the pages even though the plot is as complex a one as Slaughter has ever created. She yanks you around and pushes you through the wringer before she lets all the pieces fit into the puzzle. But then she leaves you with an enigmatic ending. I loved it!
The central focus of this story is a thirty one year old woman named Andrea. She works as a Police Dispatcher, lives with her mother, has no set career goals and no permanent relationships outside her parents. Friends, especially of the male type, are hard to come by. Andrea is one of those go along to get along persons who is basically treading water with her life.
One point of stability in her life is her mother Laura. Laura is an accomplished woman who floats thru life with serenity and poise. Even breast cancer can’t deter her. She went through the treatments and is back living her normal life. Andrea loves her, admires, her, knows her – or does she? On a day that starts out as normal as a million others something radical occurs in Andrea’s life. She learns the woman she thinks she knows through and through is possibly someone she doesn’t know at all.
This cataclysmic event occurs at the start of Slaughter’s novel and plays out over the next few hundred pages. It tells a story that takes place in the present and then flashes back to occurrences that played out thirty plus years previously. At first the places and characters who dominate the stage in these two time frames do not appear to be related in any way. However Slaughter has a plan for her story and it includes bringing those two lifetimes together.
PIECES OF HER is Slaughter slaughtering the competition with another fear grabbing, tension inducing monster of a story. Nobody, and I mean nobody, can create a tale like Slaughter does. She imagines the story in her brain and then claws it out on the pages. She never appears to wonder if maybe the violence in one or more scenes is too much; if it matches the characters and situations she has created then it is right for the book. There is no toning down, there is no looking back.
Karin Slaughter’s novels are unique to her. They are wrenched from her brain and seared upon the pages. PIECES OF HER is a book you could identify even if Slaughter’s name was not on the cover. You would recognize it as hers because no one else could have written it.
PIECES OF HER is published by William Morrow. It contains 480 pages and sells for $27.99.
Jackie K Cooper
www.jackiekcooper.com
