Karin Slaughter’s new novel is an epic tale of love, loyalty, and murder that encompasses forty years, two chillingly similar murder cases, and a good man’s deepest secrets.
Will Trent is a brilliant agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Newly in love, he is beginning to put a difficult past behind him. Then a local college student goes missing, and Will is inexplicably kept off the case by his supervisor and mentor, deputy director Amanda Wagner. Will cannot fathom Amanda’s motivation until the two of them literally collide in an abandoned orphanage they have both been drawn to for different reasons. Decades before—when Will’s father was imprisoned for murder—this was his home. . . .
Flash back nearly forty years. In the summer Will Trent was born, Amanda Wagner is going to college, making Sunday dinners for her father, taking her first steps in the boys’ club that is the Atlanta Police Department. One of her first cases is to investigate a brutal crime in one of the city’s worst neighborhoods. Amanda and her partner, Evelyn, are the only ones who seem to care if an arrest is ever made.
Now the case that launched Amanda’s career has suddenly come back to life, intertwined with the long-held mystery of Will’s birth and parentage. And these two dauntless investigators will each need to face down demons from the past if they are to prevent an even greater terror from being unleashed.
A masterpiece of character, atmosphere, and riveting suspense, Criminal is the most powerful and moving novel yet from one of our most gifted storytellers at work today.
About Karin Slaughter
Karin Slaughter is the New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling author of twelve thrillers, including Fallen, Broken, Undone, Fractured, Beyond Reach, Triptych, and Faithless. She is a native of Georgia.
Editorial Review
Georgia Tech sophomore Ashleigh Snyder has gone missing. The case is a natural for endlessly troubled GBI agent Will Trent, but for some reason Amanda, though she’s directed every other available agent to search for Ashleigh, is keeping him off the case. Not only has she banished Will to the airport in a dead-end patrol of men’s rooms, he also finds her hanging around the Techwood apartments, geographically close to Ashleigh’s place but economically a million miles away. How come? Amanda’s motives are rooted in the murder of Jane Delray (or was it Lucy Bennett, as Lucy’s brother Hank insisted?) back in 1975, the year Will was born and Amanda was cutting her teeth in the GBI. Shuttling back and forth between that fateful summer and the present, Slaughter links the murder of a prostitute you’d think would have been long forgotten to the fate of Ashleigh Snyder. As per usual in this explosive series, the darkest revelations involve recurring characters. Yet the narrative arcs of the regulars continue to fascinate because Slaughter’s not afraid to put them through irreversibly life-changing situations. – Kirkus Reviews
‘Criminal,’ a grisly thriller by Karin Slaughter
The Washington Post Book Review – July 16, 2012 (Excerpt)
Don’t be daunted by the six pages of acknowledgments listing the doctoral-dissertation-level research that went into the making of Karin Slaughter’s latest thriller. In addition to being an exhaustive and gimlet-eyed social history of modern Atlanta, especially its flawed criminal justice system and law-enforcement agencies, “Criminal” is the kind of hold-on-to-your-hat, nail-biting story Slaughter has become world-famous for.
It’s also the grisliest good-thing-it’s-not-true crime novel I’ve read since Hannibal Lecter bestrode the American publishing landscape. The physical and psychological tortures inflicted on young Atlanta prostitutes before they are murdered are described at greater length and in more punctilious detail than some readers will want to endure. But if the brave female police officers who have to confront these horrors can take it, readers should be able to handle it, too. Nor is skipping over this material a realistic option for Slaughter’s fans; it keeps recurring during meticulously rendered autopsies and in the memories of the scarred survivors of a sadist who’s right up there with Lecter in leaving an all-too-indelible impression. [Read the full article...]
Advertisement
THE BLEEDING HILLS A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss
I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith. - 2 Timothy iv. 7
The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]
We are the only country that makes guns, including military-style assault weapons, available to anyone who wants to buy them. This is not freedom. It is a tyranny of death and destruction — a tyranny of which the National Rifle Association is proud. The Washington Post
THE BLEEDING HILLS
