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Faithless by Karin Slaughter
The Blurb On The Back:
A walk in the woods takes a sinister turn for police chief Jeffrey Tolliver and medical examiner Sara Linton when they stumble across the body of a young girl. Incarcerated in the ground, all the initial evidence indicates that she has, quite literally, been scared to death.
But as Sara embarks on the autopsy, something even more horrifying comes to light. Something which shocks even her. Detective Lena Adams, talented but increasingly troubled, is called in from vacation to help with the investigation - and the trail soon leads to the neighbouring county, an isolated community, and a terrible secret ...
FAITHLESS unfortunately marks where I have to part company with Karin Slaughter. BLINDSIGHTED impressed me with its tense plotting and the fact that it revolved around two strong and interesting characters, Sara Linton and Lena Adams, but since then, each woman has become steadily weaker and more cliched in a way which, if written by a man, would be suggested to be misogynistic.
The plot revolves around Sara and Jeffrey's discovery of a girl's body buried in the woods near Sara's home. During the autopsy, it's revealed that the girl was killed with cyanide and Jeffrey's investigations lead him to a conservative Christian family who run a community on the border with the neighbouring county. The story becomes more complicated as it's revealed that the family's head, Thomas Ward, had a relationship with Sara's mother many years earlier, leading her to question her own family history. At the same time, it's discovered that the victim was pregnant, leading Lena to draw parallels with her own life and specifically, an abortion that she's just undergone in Atlanta.
Part of the problem for me is that I've never been able to buy into Sara and Jeffrey's relationship, specifically why she continues to feel so drawn to a man who cheated on her. Slaughter does nothing to make this any more credible by introducing a hepatitis scare early on in the book, which specifically takes the couple back to Jeffrey's cheating. Although this appears intended to flush out Sara's confusion and her need for her ex-husband, the way in which the storyline will play out is never in doubt and her dilemma has a distinctly 'going through the motions' feel to it. What it does do though is to make the second storyline regarding Sara's suspicions of her mother and the nature of her relationship with Thomas Ward particularly ludicrous, turning as it does on an assumption that surely no qualified doctor would ever make. When Sara's mother calls her on her stupidity, you can't help but nod along with her.
Fortunately, Sara plays second fiddle to Lena and Jeffrey in this book (in fact, she barely factors in the novel after the half-way mark). Unfortunately, Lena is even less convincing of a character. The fact that she's in an abusive relationship is difficult to buy into, made worse by the fact that Slaughter puntuates it with the usual cliches without ever really exploring just why it is that a character as strong as Lena feels unable to pull away from Ethan (a stereotypical woman beater). Slaughter uses it to draw a parallel with a member of the victim's family, but the comparison is weak (not least because you never get a sense of what the other woman has gone through until the end of the book, by which time it's too late to sympathise with her). Her abortion storyline is perfunctorily dealt with, only making an appearance when it's convenient to the storyline. What I really can't forgive though is just how useless Lena consistently is as a detective and why Jeffrey continues to give her second-chances. It smacks of tokenism and it really goes to reduce the character still further.
I worked out who did it about 10 pages after the character was introduced. Again, Slaughter shows no interest in fleshing this character out and they're almost cartoony in their motivation. I did enjoy the procedural elements, particularly the attention to detail during the autopsy scenes, which are realistic, and I should say that Lena is given a chance of redemption by the end of the novel. However it's too little, too late.
The Verdict:
Really disappointing. The female characters are reduced to cliches, the murderer is an obvious get and the whole book just really irritated me. It's a shame, because I thought this series began really strongly, but since then the female characters are reduced to being defined by their reliance on men and I find it really objectionable.
A walk in the woods takes a sinister turn for police chief Jeffrey Tolliver and medical examiner Sara Linton when they stumble across the body of a young girl. Incarcerated in the ground, all the initial evidence indicates that she has, quite literally, been scared to death.
But as Sara embarks on the autopsy, something even more horrifying comes to light. Something which shocks even her. Detective Lena Adams, talented but increasingly troubled, is called in from vacation to help with the investigation - and the trail soon leads to the neighbouring county, an isolated community, and a terrible secret ...
FAITHLESS unfortunately marks where I have to part company with Karin Slaughter. BLINDSIGHTED impressed me with its tense plotting and the fact that it revolved around two strong and interesting characters, Sara Linton and Lena Adams, but since then, each woman has become steadily weaker and more cliched in a way which, if written by a man, would be suggested to be misogynistic.
The plot revolves around Sara and Jeffrey's discovery of a girl's body buried in the woods near Sara's home. During the autopsy, it's revealed that the girl was killed with cyanide and Jeffrey's investigations lead him to a conservative Christian family who run a community on the border with the neighbouring county. The story becomes more complicated as it's revealed that the family's head, Thomas Ward, had a relationship with Sara's mother many years earlier, leading her to question her own family history. At the same time, it's discovered that the victim was pregnant, leading Lena to draw parallels with her own life and specifically, an abortion that she's just undergone in Atlanta.
Part of the problem for me is that I've never been able to buy into Sara and Jeffrey's relationship, specifically why she continues to feel so drawn to a man who cheated on her. Slaughter does nothing to make this any more credible by introducing a hepatitis scare early on in the book, which specifically takes the couple back to Jeffrey's cheating. Although this appears intended to flush out Sara's confusion and her need for her ex-husband, the way in which the storyline will play out is never in doubt and her dilemma has a distinctly 'going through the motions' feel to it. What it does do though is to make the second storyline regarding Sara's suspicions of her mother and the nature of her relationship with Thomas Ward particularly ludicrous, turning as it does on an assumption that surely no qualified doctor would ever make. When Sara's mother calls her on her stupidity, you can't help but nod along with her.
Fortunately, Sara plays second fiddle to Lena and Jeffrey in this book (in fact, she barely factors in the novel after the half-way mark). Unfortunately, Lena is even less convincing of a character. The fact that she's in an abusive relationship is difficult to buy into, made worse by the fact that Slaughter puntuates it with the usual cliches without ever really exploring just why it is that a character as strong as Lena feels unable to pull away from Ethan (a stereotypical woman beater). Slaughter uses it to draw a parallel with a member of the victim's family, but the comparison is weak (not least because you never get a sense of what the other woman has gone through until the end of the book, by which time it's too late to sympathise with her). Her abortion storyline is perfunctorily dealt with, only making an appearance when it's convenient to the storyline. What I really can't forgive though is just how useless Lena consistently is as a detective and why Jeffrey continues to give her second-chances. It smacks of tokenism and it really goes to reduce the character still further.
I worked out who did it about 10 pages after the character was introduced. Again, Slaughter shows no interest in fleshing this character out and they're almost cartoony in their motivation. I did enjoy the procedural elements, particularly the attention to detail during the autopsy scenes, which are realistic, and I should say that Lena is given a chance of redemption by the end of the novel. However it's too little, too late.
The Verdict:
Really disappointing. The female characters are reduced to cliches, the murderer is an obvious get and the whole book just really irritated me. It's a shame, because I thought this series began really strongly, but since then the female characters are reduced to being defined by their reliance on men and I find it really objectionable.