Pieces
of Her, by Karin Slaughter – and the sequel,
Girl
Forgotten.
It’s obviously best to read Book One first (Duh!), where
we meet Andrea Oliver, a 31-year-old college drop-out who is finding it hard to
get out of bed, let alone get her life into some kind of order, even though she
has an enormously supportive mother who lives and works in a lovely Delaware seaside
community as a speech therapist: Andrea
lives above her mum’s garage in a very small apartment – and wishes she didn’t,
but can’t summon the will and determination to organise herself away from there
and Mum’s loving but smothering apron strings.
Until a coffee morning at the local Mall turns into a
bloodbath, with her life being threatened by a disturbed (I’ll say!)
eighteen-year-old with a gun: two people
die in the carnage, but her mother, in an act of impossible bravery, saves her
– by knifing the shooter. It transpires
that in the subsequent investigation, Andrea’s mum is the complete opposite to
the façade she has always presented to the world, in fact she is in a
witness-protection program instituted by the US Marshal Service, part of a
plea-deal she made with authorities to incarcerate a band of would-be domestic
terrorists many years ago. All were intent on blowing up various parts of
down-town New York to protest at the corrupt capitalist world-order.
Needless to say, Andrea is in shock, and finally gets
enough gumption to start investigating the past. What she discovers will change her life
forever.
‘Girl Forgotten’ starts in a flash-back to the Eighties
in the same seaside town that was Andrea’s home: Emily Vaughn, a hugely pregnant high-school
student, is determined to attend the school Prom, regardless of her rich and
powerful parents’ orders not to. She
wants to confront her former friends who have all blanked her since she found
that she was pregnant, the friends who were known as The Clique, envied,
admired, intellectually and culturally superior – they were all going to make
such an impact! Until Emily appeared and embarrassed them,
especially their charismatic ‘leader’ Clayton Morrow: he expected to go farther than anyone – for
God’s sake, get her out of here.
Emily’s naked body is eventually found in a
dumpster. The murderer is never found,
and The Clique disbands, all going their separate ways, until Andrea Oliver,
newly graduated as a US Marshal, is sent to the town to protect the late Emily
Vaughn’s mother, a prominent Supreme Court Justice, from recent death threats. Yes, Andrea has finally gotten herself
together; she has discovered some
terrifying secrets about her origins, but they have energised and given her
focus at last, and Emily’s cold-case is just one of several mysteries she wants
to solve.
This is the first time I have read anything by Ms
Slaughter, and I greatly admire her ability to keep the many and complicated
threads of her plot powering along at a mighty rate. The suspense almost never flags, except for a
time just before the end of ‘Girl Forgotten’, but that’s a small quibble when
viewed overall. She is an immensely
enjoyable and entertaining writer and deserves her best-seller status. FIVE STARS EACH.
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