“Nothing is as it seems,” the guiding principle of crime/mystery fiction, is in full effect in Karin Slaughter’s FRACTURED. Right from the first chapter, she defies our foregone conclusions and expectations. There’s a fine line between cheating the reader and catching us off guard. The latter is profoundly difficult. But Slaughter pulls it off and carries us along with more surprises along the way.
Will Trent, first introduced in 2006’s TRIPTYCH, and his Atlanta home turf return in this new work. Trent, now a detective with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, is dispatched to an opulent mansion in the upscale neighborhood of Ansley Park, where a teenage girl has been brutally stabbed.
The mother, who happened upon the scene, strangled the male attacker to death with her bare hands. But as Trent observes the trail of blood and other evidence at the scene, he soon discovers that there is much more to this horrible situation: Another teenage girl is missing and a killer is still on the loose.
Bowing to political pressure from the murdered girl’s powerful grandfather, the case is immediately taken from the police and turned over to the GBI. Trent is assigned to work with Faith Mitchell, a police detective and daughter of a recently resigned Georgia police investigator. But this paring causes immediate tension, as Trent had previously conducted an internal investigation of police officers skimming confiscated drug money, and the results implicated Faith’s mother, forcing her resignation.
Trent himself carries more than his fair share of personal baggage, having spent his childhood in various state orphanages until legal age. Now he shares his personal life in a dead-end relationship with his live-in girlfriend, a police inspector with a reputation for bedding down most of her follow officers. Along with all of this, Trent hides a personal secret that he fears could jeopardize his career. To reveal this secret would certainly spoil much of the novel’s suspense. Suffice to say, it is often regarded as a disability.
Trent and Mitchell gather what scant evidence they have and immediately search the murdered girl’s activities, friends and high school faculty. Meanwhile, forensic investigators uncover clues from the autopsy and other physical evidence collected at and around the scene. Then a phone call confirms that indeed another girl has been abducted and is being held for ransom. The investigation immediately becomes a race against time to find the kidnapped girl before she is murdered.
The pacing from the very start shifts into high gear, with jolts strong enough to cause whiplash. As readers of Slaughter’s previous books know, she rarely holds anything back. But while the intrinsic violence and perversions are graphically presented, they are seldom gratuitous.
Trent and Mitchell are both well-rounded characters. They maintain a confident air in their work while keeping their insecurities hidden. Other characters who appear either frequently, occasionally or only once are equally credible (but we’ve had quite enough of those overweight, poorly dressed coroners with their gallows humor and their sandwiches pulled from the body refrigeration units and eaten while presenting the results of their autopsies).
The city of Atlanta, with its sweltering heat and abrupt divisions of poor and wealthy neighborhoods, is an effective backdrop to the action. Fortunately, Slaughter avoids having her characters speak in forced, Southern dialects. (We don’t need a plethora of “y’all” and “tell you what” to know they’re Southerners.)
The book’s title is an accurate description of how the crimes affect survivors, as well as the detectives. It also describes how the entire cast is left, even after the novel’s resolution. Will Trent is certainly a strong enough character to support his own series, if that is what Slaughter has in mind. In any event, FRACTURED will please her fans and easily make new ones. —Alan Cranis
