Broken by Karin Slaughter

Not a page turner..., May 8, 2010

This review is from: Broken: A Novel (Grant County) (Hardcover)

This is the second Grant County novel to feature Will Trent along with Sara Linton. His partner, Faith, is not in this novel except as a phone buddy as she is about to have a baby. Although the story line was decent enough, it lacked the pulse pounding suspense and true thriller sense that I usually get from one of Karin Slaughter's books. The narrative seemed to drag a little and I was a bit disappointed with this one. Two college kids are killed -- why? The murders seemed fairly brutal and a bit of overkill once the reader finds out the reason for them. The police think they have the murderer, a mentally slow man who commits suicide in his cell after giving a full confession. But something isn't quite right and GBI investigator Will Trent starts to wonder if the police are obstructing justice.

I was a little confused at first that Will and Sarah seemed so stiff with each other as I had thought that in the previous novel featuring the two of them -- Undone: A Novel (Grant County) -- that they had already sort of acknowledged, at least to themselves, that there was an attraction and the beginning of some kind of romance. Of course, as always, the ghost of his wife Angie, still looms large. I do wish that he would end things with her once and for all. It lessens him as a character, to me, that he allows her to manipulate him as she does. Other than that, I like him as as character, flawed with his pride and dysgraphia (or dyslexia) but how many times do we have to hear about his handicap and see him rescued. And Lena, she's up to all her usual tricks and scams. She is a hard character to empathize with, because even as she allows herself some humanity and does tell a bit of the truth to clear things up a bit, she never can bring herself to completely come totally clean and her motives are always questionable. Sara Linton is still grieving the death of Jeffery.

Several interesting revelations about the characters occur, and most of the loose ends are tied up at the end of the book. All in all, it was a fairly satisfying piece of crime fiction although not as thrilling as some of the previous books.