Amazon.com
Medical examiner Sara Linton and police chief Jeffrey Tolliver make their fourth appearance in this riveting new back-and-forth thriller that grounds a brutal attack by two young men on the Grant County, Georgia police department in a twelve-year-old Alabama murder case that occurred while Sara and Jeffrey were just beginning their tumultuous romance. En route to a beach vacation shortly after they meet, the couple takes a detour to the small town where Jeffrey grew up and began his law enforcement career. But their carefree holiday is interrupted when his best friend from childhood, a fellow cop, is charged with murder after killing a man who broke into his house. Despite his subsequent confession, Jeffrey believes there’s more to the story than Robert is telling him, and when the skeleton of a young woman with whom both Robert and Tolliver were once involved is discovered in a secret cave only they knew about, and Robert admits to her murder too, Tolliver must again confront a past he thought he had long since put behind him.
Slaughter unravels a convoluted story deftly and smoothly as the action moves between those long-ago events and the siege of the police station by two young men who are determined to make Jeffrey pay for a crime they believe he committed. Threatening to kill whoever stands between them and their target--including eight children on a school field trip at the station house when the bloody siege begins--they execute a deputy they mistakenly believe is Tolliver. Skillfully blending past and present events and illuminating the equally convoluted relationship between Sara and Jeffrey (who have married and divorced in the intervening years) without interrupting the breathtaking pace of the action or dropping a beat, Slaughter takes this series to a new level of excellence. --Jane Adams
From Publishers Weekly
Complex characters with credible relationships underpin this gripping prequel to Slaughter's Blindsighted (2001). Georgia pediatrician/medical examiner Sara Linton is visiting her ex-husband, Police Chief Jeffrey Tolliver, when two malevolent strangers, hauntingly familiar to Sara, pull out guns at the station house, where several schoolchildren are on a class trip, and bloody mayhem ensues. The action shifts to the past, when new lovers Sara and Jeffrey detour to his hometown on their way to a beach weekend. A nostalgic tour of Jeffrey's youth turns sinister as buried secrets and injustices slowly come to light. An ugly midnight encounter with Jeffrey's sloshed mother sends Sara outside in time to hear gunshots from the neighboring house of Jeffrey's childhood friend Robert, a cop, who's found bleeding, gun in hand, across the bedroom from his dead victim. Sara is grateful to perform the autopsy, knowing there's more than meets the eye in this puzzling crime scene. The couple's budding romance is put to the test as Sara tries to coax answers from tight-lipped Jeffrey, whose silence and suspicious actions nourish her doubts. Slaughter's tightly disciplined rhythm and occasional sly humor keep readers hooked right up to the end. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
You get a lot of bangs for your bucks in Karin Slaughter's new thriller. Fourteen pages into Indelible, pediatrician Sara Linton and others are taken hostage in the Grant County, Ga., police station, which two gun-wielding intruders have strewn with gore and dead bodies. Just as that imbroglio is raising hairs, Slaughter launches a subplot that occurred a decade earlier, at the beginning of the love affair between Sara and her ex-husband, Jeffrey Tolliver, who is now Grant County's police chief and one of Sara's fellow hostages. Soon this flashback, set in the Alabama town where Jeffrey grew up, turns tense, too: Sara and Jeffrey arrive at the house of his best friend, Robert, shortly after Robert has apparently shot an intruder dead and taken a bullet in the abdomen. From that point on, the narrative switches back and forth from the hostage scene to the investigation of the double shooting, which looks a bit fishy to Sara's medically trained eye.On top of all this, Indelible is a prequel, designed in part to fill in the backgrounds of Sara and Jeffrey, who recur in other Slaughter novels. The question is whether the author does justice to the multiple layers of her material.Almost from the start, I found the flashback the more interesting of the two storylines. Mayhem in a police station, followed by a hostage-taking, may be ideal thriller fare, but one of Slaughter's strengths is her charting of post-sexual-revolution male-female dynamics, and this comes to the fore in the earlier, Alabama sequences. At that stage, Sara and Jeffrey have slept together several times but still hardly know each other, and much of what his friends say about him comes as news to her -- that he went to college, for example. What she does know is that he deserves the nickname his pals greet him with -- Slick -- so much so that she's of two minds about his riposte to her observation that a handsome, randy guy like him must have "screwed practically every woman in town": "They were just place-holders while I waited for you," he says. It's a perfect line, especially when delivered by a man who acts on Sara "like some drug that she could not get enough of," and she wants very much to believe him. But he's not Slick for nothing, is he?Their process of getting acquainted becomes even more fraught when Sara and Jeffrey duck into a local cave to escape a rainstorm and discover a human skeleton inside, its skull bashed in such a way as to indicate homicide. Turns out that Jeffrey's old friends -- some of whom are policemen, too -- figure in both cases: the double shooting and the remains in the cave. Just how they are implicated lies at the heart of the mystery that unfolds as the young lovers keep sparring and sizing each other up.For that matter, the novel's two main foci -- past murders and present-day hostage crisis -- are not as discrete as they first appear. The main thread tying them together is all the sleeping around engaged in by the younger generation of Alabama townspeople. (The not-so-subliminal message is that sex is apt to be more powerful -- and have more lasting effects -- than bed-hopping teenagers would like to believe.)Throughout Indelible, Slaughter excels at pitting one strong character against another. A long conversation between Sara and her mother, as Sara gets ready to go off for a weekend with Jeffrey and her mother takes over the packing, epitomizes the blend of love, bossiness, resistance, banter and tenuous compromise that shapes relations between a tough-minded parent and a willful child. And in Slaughter's steady hands, the trajectory of Sara and Jeffrey's off-and-on romance is clear and convincing.Ultimately, though, too much happens in this book. For all its deaths and splattered walls and countdowns toward the moment when the cops will rush their own station house, the hostage crisis gets shortchanged. Maybe Slaughter asked too much of herself in trying to fuse a prequel with an update (the outcome of the present-day crisis sets the stage for a new act in the Sara-Jeffrey relationship). To readers who concentrate on the Alabama murder case, however, Indelible will give considerable pleasure. Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From AudioFile
Past and present are woven seamlessly in this thriller. Narrator Becky Ann Baker's versatile range carries the listener from Police Chief Jeffrey Tolliver's youth in Alabama to Dr. Sara Linton's life-altering rape in Atlanta to a murderous standoff in a small-town Georgia police station. When a young man from Tolliver's past (chillingly vocalized as cold and troubled) is determined to bring the chief down, divorced couple Tolliver and Linton must team up to prevent disaster. Baker's delightful characterizations of Tolliver's foul-mouthed mother, good-old-boy mentor, and longtime nemesis bring together the seeds of disaster sown years earlier. J.J.B. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
This fourth entry in Slaughter's Grant County series features meticulous plotting, a cast full of the walking wounded, and gruesome forensic detail. Small-town pediatrician and part-time coroner Sara Linton stops by the police station to give her ex-husband, Chief Jeffrey Tolliver, her much-practiced speech on why they should not get remarried. Sara still loves Jeffrey, but she continues to suffer from the emotional fallout of his infidelity, which broke up the marriage. But their heart-to-heart is soon interrupted by gunfire as two zombie-eyed, heavily armed 20-year-olds enter the station and open fire. In the tense standoff that follows, Sara flashes back 12 years to when she first met Jeffrey. Frenetically cross-cutting from one time frame to another, the novel intersperses the events that occurred then with the dire circumstances in the present, as multiple police officers lie dead and dying. After a few surprising twists and a head-turning appearance by the series' third lead character, officer Lena Adams, the two story lines converge. What's even more disturbing here than the graphically detailed violence is the creepy atmosphere as Slaughter creates a town, and a world, full of the revenge-seeking victims of child abuse. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Kirkus Reviews
"Amazingly, Slaughter manages between past and present stories while maintaining suspense in both."
Publishers Weekly
"Gripping…complex characters with credible relationships…keep[s] readers hooked right up to the end."
Publishers Weekly
"Gripping…complex characters with credible relationships…Slaughter’s tightly disciplined rhythm and occasional sly humor keep readers hooked right up to the end."
Entertainment Weekly
"[Slaughter] has a bighearted way…and a knack for grisly detail."
Book Description
The internationally bestselling author "squarely in the ranks of Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs" (Publishers Weekly) shows off her superb talent with this brilliantly conceived, skillfully executed tale of suspense.
In Karin Slaughter's exciting new thriller, an officer is shot point-blank in the Grant County police station and police chief Jeffrey Tolliver is wounded, setting off a terrifying hostage situation with medical examiner Sara Linton at the center. Working outside the station, Lena Adams, newly reinstated to the force, and Frank Wallace, Jeffrey's second in command, must try to piece together who the shooter is and how to rescue their friends before Jeffrey dies. For the sins of the past have caught up with Sara and Jeffrey -- with a vengeance ...
Deftly interweaving present and past, Slaughter -- dubbed "the new face of crime" by Book magazine -- offers another brilliant knife-edge tale of suspense that cements her place among the most outstanding practitioners of crime fiction today.
Download Description
"
The internationally bestselling author ""squarely in the ranks of Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs"" (Publishers Weekly) shows off her superb talent with this brilliantly conceived, skillfully executed tale of suspense.
In Karin Slaughter's exciting new thriller, an officer is shot point-blank in the Grant County police station and police chief Jeffrey Tolliver is wounded, setting off a terrifying hostage situation with medical examiner Sara Linton at the center. Working outside the station, Lena Adams, newly reinstated to the force, and Frank Wallace, Jeffrey's second in command, must try to piece together who the shooter is and how to rescue their friends before Jeffrey dies. For the sins of the past have caught up with Sara and Jeffrey -- with a vengeance ...
Deftly interweaving present and past, Slaughter -- dubbed ""the new face of crime"" by Book magazine -- offers another brilliant knife-edge tale of suspense that cements her place among the most outstanding practitioners of crime fiction today."
About the Author
Karin Slaughter is the internationally bestselling author of Blindsighted, Kisscut, A Faint Cold Fear, and the forthcoming Indelible, the fourth novel in her Grant County series. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
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