Triptych, by Karin Slaughter

FIVE of FIVE stars

Wow, I LOVED this book. Why have I never heard of Karin Slaughter and am I the only person in the world who hasn’t read her books? If so, that needs to change. This book was five stars all the way around.

This is one of the most solid, well written, thriller/crime/mystery novels by a male or female author that I have ever read. The characters were fantastic, well fleshed out with complete backgrounds. Both good guys and bad guys had both good and bad sides, and for a long time it is impossible to know who the bad guy is – when I realized who it was I was FLOORED. I slammed the book shut and had to go get a glass of water and a snack, I knew I was going to be up all night reading it. I was gobsmacked at least twice in the book. It was also a very intricate and well thought out plot, and though it was so complicated that it may have been slightly over the top in believability… I still bought it.

I was really impressed with the characterizations though. The good guys were so damaged and hurt and broken, just as much if not more than the bad guys, in fact MUCH more than the bad guys. It really was a group of characters who had individually decided who they were going to be in life. Only one character was not given a choice.

Yes, it breaks one of my firm rules: the “bad guy” confesses all his sins at the end right before he’s going to kill his final victims… but Slaughter somehow pulls this off and I believe in the reasons for the confession. So this might be my one exception for the “Minus 1 Star” rule I have about Bad Guy Confessions.

The opening crime is pretty gory, and I don’t recommend eating while reading the first couple chapters (a mistake I regretfully made). And the very last violent scene in the book was very disturbing to read. But throughout the book the author wants you to know what happens to the bodies, souls and minds of those who have been sexually abused, and I don’t feel it was overdone. She has an Author’s Note at the end with some statistics, and the truth of those numbers smacks the book’s violence home even further. But that is the point. We can sit here in our comfortable homes reading our books, but there are millions of people out there suffering from things that happened to them as children as well as adults. There are real people out there who suffered through things that happened in this book, there are people who are suffering those things this very minute.

I don’t know how I came to put this on my library request list. It’s the first in a series about Special Agent Will Trent (SUCH an interesting character) and it’s from 2006. There are a zillion mystery/crime novels out there to read, I wouldn’t normally start up with a series from so long ago. But I’m so glad I did. I will definitely be reading the rest of this series, especially if it holds up in quality. This is better than any Patricia Cornwell or James Patterson book. But then again, I may be the last person on earth to have discovered this.