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Book Summary and Reviews of Criminal by Karin Slaughter

Criminal by Karin Slaughter

Criminal

A Novel

by Karin Slaughter

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  • Published:
  • Jul 2012, 448 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

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.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Fascinating... Slaughter delivers another riveting, pulse-pounding crime novel." - Booklist

"Slaughter seamlessly shifts between past and present, while her usual attentive eye for character and carefully metered violence is on full display." - Publishers Weekly

"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

"Karin Slaughter's best yet by far: All her signature strengths are amplified a hundredfold by the past explaining the present. Reading this book was like watching a great athlete having a career year." - Lee Child

This information about Criminal was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

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Stuart Gottfried

Karin's best
Simply put, this is Karin's most thoughtful and most well constructed novel in the Will Trent series, my having read ten. (I keep asking myself why I don't have something better to do.) I marvel at the sheer volume of the quality of her writing. Honestly, I can't fathom how Karin does it.

Cloggie Downunder

does not disappoint!
Criminal is the 7th in Karin Slaughter’s Will Trent series. The story shifts between the early seventies and the present day. The present day is 2 weeks after the events of the 5th book in the series, Fallen (the 6th book being the eShort, Snatched), while the flashback covers several months from mid-1974 to mid-1975 when Will’s boss in the GBI, Amanda Wagner, and Faith’s mother, Evelyn, were rookie cops together at the Atlanta PD. Readers who are eager for more of Will and Sara may be disappointed to find much of the action is with Amanda and Evelyn, but Slaughter manages to make this an engrossing read, all the same. Whilst Slaughter touches on issues of race and gender in mid-70’s Atlanta, the story also reveals much of Amanda and Evelyn’s early careers, and Will’s parentage. She develops these characters, gives the reader a bit of background to Will’s mercurial relationship with Amanda, and shows that even the seemingly hard Amanda has a caring side. Slaughter is an expert at creating atmosphere and building tension and can make the reader feel uncomfortable in just a few skilful paragraphs. These two stories, told in tandem, each have a heart-thumping climax. As always the plot is excellent and includes a few twists, the dialogue realistic and Slaughter gives the reader three strong female leads trying to do a good job under difficult circumstances. Slaughter’s depth of research into 70’s Atlanta is apparent in every sentence. Her main focus in writing this book, according to the Acknowledgements, was to tell a good story, and this she has expertly achieved. I always hesitate to start reading a new Karin Slaughter book because I know that once I do, I won’t be able to put it down and, even at 400 plus pages, the reading pleasure will be over that much sooner. Once again, Slaughter does not disappoint.

Kingkhan

CRIMINAL
Reading first book by this author. Very boring

Dennise Turner

Disappointingly
I'm a big fan of Karin Slaughter

I didn't like this book at all. For me it was frustrating & didn't flow. It didn't draw me in as her books usually do. The most annoying aspect of the book was the back and forth - just as I felt up to date & interested, we had to go back in time and it was confusing rather than enlightening

Sorry. Just didn't work for me....

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Author Information

Karin Slaughter Author Biography

Photo: Alison Rosa

Karin Slaughter is one of the world's most popular and acclaimed storytellers. Published in 120 countries with more than 35 million copies sold across the globe, her 21 novels include the Grant County and Will Trent books, as well as the Edgar-nominated Cop Town and the instant New York Times bestselling stand-alone novels Pretty Girls, The Good Daughter, and Pieces of Her. Slaughter is the founder of the Save the Libraries project—a nonprofit organization established to support libraries and library programming. A native of Georgia, she lives in Atlanta. Her stand-alone novel Pieces of Her is in development with Netflix, starring Toni Collette, and the Grant County and Will Trent series are in development for television.

Link to Karin Slaughter's Website

Other books by Karin Slaughter at BookBrowse

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More Recommendations

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