Review: Criminal by Karin Slaughter

A Mysterious Review of …

Criminal by Karin Slaughter. A Will Trent Mystery.

Review summary: This crime novel is essentially two books linked by only the most convenient of plot devices. One of these "books" is worth reading; indeed, it is exceptional. But it is nearly overwhelmed by the second "book", a parallel storyline that is essentially a research paper on how hard it was to be a female police detective in the 1970s, no doubt of interest to some, but a narrative that should have been a paragraph or two at most, not half the book. (Click here for text of full review.)

Our rating:

Criminal
Karin Slaughter
A Will Trent Mystery
Delacorte Press (July 2012)

Publisher synopsis: 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.