Criminal: A Novel (with bonus novella Snatched): A Novel [Kindle Edition]

Karin Slaughter (Author)

Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“[A] hold-on-to-your-hat, nail-biting story.”—The Washington Post
 
“Slaughter’s best yet, by far.”—Lee Child
 
Will Trent is a brilliant agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Newly in love, he is beginning to put a difficult past behind him. Then a local college student goes missing, and Will is inexplicably kept off the case by his supervisor and mentor, deputy director Amanda Wagner. Will cannot fathom Amanda’s motivation until the two of them literally collide in an abandoned orphanage they have both been drawn to for different reasons. Decades before, when his father was imprisoned for murder, this was Will’s home. It appears that the case that launched Amanda’s career forty years ago has suddenly come back to life—and it involves the long-held mystery of Will’s birth and parentage. Now these two dauntless investigators will each need to face down demons from the past if they are to prevent an even greater terror from being unleashed.

Includes Karin Slaughter’s short story “Snatched” and a preview of the next Will Trent novel, Unseen

“With every page of this story the tension mounts. . . . If you have a hunger for a rich and fulfilling novel then you owe it to yourself to pick up Criminal.”—Huffington Post
 
“A masterpiece of character, atmosphere and riveting suspense, Criminal is the most powerful and moving novel yet from one of the most gifted storytellers at work today.”—Chicago Daily Herald

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Criminal
 
“Karin Slaughter’s best yet by far: All her signature strengths are amplified a hundredfold by the past explaining the present. Reading this book was like watching a great athlete having a career year.”—Lee Child
 
“Fascinating . . . Slaughter delivers another riveting, pulse-pounding crime novel.”—Booklist (starred review)

“With every page of this story the tension mounts . . . If you have a hunger for a rich and fulfilling novel then you owe it to yourself to pick up Criminal. . . . Slaughter at her most visceral and gut-wrenching best.”—The Huffington Post

“Slaughter’s tense fourth thriller to combine characters from her two crime series . . . seamlessly shifts between past and present.”—Publishers Weekly

“A jolting case that involves murders separated by 40 years . . . explosive.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Karin Slaughter prove she's one of the best crime novelists at work today with Criminal. [She] weaves a rich tapestry of complex characters with a compelling mystery. Readers will feel emotionally attached to these characters, and their journey will both delight and surprise even the jaded suspense fan.”—Associated Press

“They don’t call Slaughter 'the thinking woman’s thriller writer' for nothing—her pacing assumes you can keep up.”—BookRiot

“Special Agent Will Trent has to be one of the most fascinating suspense protagonists in recent memory . . . Criminal offers a look back at 1970s Southern culture (with all its gentility and warts), a dash of romance for its unlikely protagonist and a twist ending that few will see coming.”—Bookpage



PRAISE FOR THE CRIME FICTION OF KARIN SLAUGHTER 

“Karin Slaughter is one of the best crime novelists in America.”—The Washington Post

“Crime fiction at its finest.”—Michael Connelly

“An absolute master.”—Chicago Tribune

“Slaughter writes with a razor. . . . Better than Cornwell can ever hope to be.”—The Plain Dealer

“Slaughter will have you on the edge of your seat.”—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“One of the boldest thriller writers working today.”—Tess Gerritsen 

“Move over, Catherine Coulter—Slaughter may be today’s top female suspense writer.”—Library Journal (starred review)

Review

Advance praise for Criminal
 
“Karin Slaughter’s best yet by far: All her signature strengths are amplified a hundredfold by the past explaining the present. Reading this book was like watching a great athlete having a career year.”—Lee Child
 
“Fascinating . . . Slaughter delivers another riveting, pulse-pounding crime novel.”—Booklist (starred review)

PRAISE FOR THE CRIME FICTION OF KARIN SLAUGHTER 

“Karin Slaughter is one of the best crime novelists in America.”—The Washington Post

“Crime fiction at its finest.”—Michael Connelly

“An absolute master.”—Chicago Tribune

“Slaughter writes with a razor. . . . Better than Cornwell can ever hope to be.”—The Plain Dealer

“Slaughter will have you on the edge of your seat.”—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“One of the boldest thriller writers working today.”—Tess Gerritsen 

“Move over, Catherine Coulter—Slaughter may be today’s top female suspense writer.”—Library Journal (starred review)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• File Size: 1493 KB
• Print Length: 448 pages
• Publisher: Dell (July 3, 2012)
• Sold by: Random House Digital, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B005X0JUBW
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,050 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

88 of 93 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars "Why do you crave a life of sin?" June 30, 2012

By E. Bukowsky HALL OF FAMETOP 50 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

For years, Karin Slaughter has been tantalizing us with bits and pieces of Will Trent's history. Followers of Slaughter's popular series know that Will is an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He is dyslexic, scarred physically and psychologically from years in an orphanage and on the streets, and barely made it out of his hellish childhood intact. An ill-advised marriage to a fellow orphan, Angie, has brought Will additional misery. Even though he is still Angie's husband, Will has fallen for pediatrician Sara Linton; Sara cares for him, as well, but she wonders if she can truly be close to a man who has so much emotional baggage. Slaughter's audience knows Sara intimately as a beautiful and brilliant physician and medical examiner who played a prominent role in earlier books.

In "Criminal," Slaughter tells her story in alternating chapters, some of which take place in 1974-75. In the opening scene, we meet a group of wretched female drug addicts. They are at the mercy of a brute who sells their bodies on the street and keeps most of the money they earn for himself. Nineteen-year-old Lucy Bennett started her habit when she took speed to lose weight. She graduated to "injectable amphetamine" and everything spiraled downward from there. Now, she feels as if "she'd swallowed a truckload of concrete" and her hair has been falling out in clumps. Her plight is particularly heartrending since she had once been a good student with a bright future. Now, she is just another streetwalker with dead eyes.

Slaughter places us squarely in Atlanta's underbelly: We witness the unspeakable torture and slaying of helpless women as well as the racism, sexism, and corruption that infected the city's police department in the mid-seventies. The changes that would eventually free women and African-Americans from years of subservience were just beginning.

At the heart of the novel is a shadowy and hulking figure who is obsessed with controlling the prostitutes whom he abducts. On his trail are twenty-five year old Amanda Wagner (Will's current boss) and her colleague, the "pushy and opinionated" Evelyn Mitchell. Both pound pavements, interview witnesses, and resolve to help those who have no one willing to fight for them. Their colleagues are mostly chauvinistic males who taunt and threaten them, but Amanda and Evelyn persist in doing their jobs under difficult circumstances.

This is a suspenseful, hard-hitting, and complex police procedural that provides a vivid portrait of a southern city in transition. Although the subject matter is often distasteful and depressing, Slaughter holds our interest by providing fragments of the truth but withholding the ways in which these fragments fit together. It is not until the final pages that the author ties up the story's dangling threads. "Criminal" is sordid, at times heavy-handed, and a bit drawn out, but it also a chilling, powerful, and poignant tale of hatred, revenge, insanity, compassion, and love.

37 of 40 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "Sometimes it's criminal what a woman has to do" July 3, 2012

By Jim Munchel

Format:Hardcover

The title of my review was taken from the novel CRIMINAL by Karin Slaughter.
A literary tree was planted in her first thriller BLINDSIGHTED with the tangled roots of Sara Linton, small-town pediatrician and her ex husband Jeffrey Tolliver, sherriff of Heartsdale, Georgia.
The twisted branches grew strong with the likes of Jeff's friend Lena Adams and an assortment of diseased characters feeding off the basis of Sara and Jeff's relationship.
From those branches grasping for a place in the heart of darkness bloom Will Trent, Faith Mithcell and Amanda Wagner,all an integral part of the mind of one of the finest mystery writers I have ever read.

Instead of delving into the plot(s) of CRIMINAL without giving any red herrings away or 'spoiler alerts' I wish to give my observations of what drives myself (in my opinion) and her readers to wait with controlled anticipation for her next thriller to be published.

If one is 'not' a Karin Slaughter novice then one knows about her ability to create such flesh and blood characters when something bad or evil happens to them your gut tightens and you are driven to continue reading and hope for a better outcome.
That is truly a rare gift!

IN CRIMINAL Ms. Slaughter weaves two mysteries together thirty five years apart.
1975 is re-imagined with all the sights, smells and everyday functions that only a great writer could accomplish.
From how women detectives were treated to how they interacted with each other.

Lastly, one of the most sastisfying endings of any thriller I have read in the past year!!!

Jim Munchel/Books A Million, Harrisburg, Pa.
Co-Manager Books

37 of 45 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Surprisingly disjointed entry into the normally excellent Georgia series July 14, 2012

By Wendy Darling

Format:Hardcover

I eagerly anticipate every single book by Karin Slaughter, and she's never let me down when it comes to Will Trent and Sara Linton--and after last year's fantastic Fallen, I was really excited to read her new book. Criminal is, however, my least favorite book by this author yet, and the first book in the Georgia series that I've rated less than 4 stars. After thoroughly enjoying each of the previous (12?) novels in this series, it's something of a shock to find myself with such mixed/negative feelings about this one.

The two things that normally make Karin Slaughter books so damned good are crackling, suspenseful mysteries and strong characters that you passionately care about. In Criminal, those elements are woefully obscured by the book's structure (too many POVs, many of which are too long for secondary characters), too much focus on Amanda Wagner's past (which sounded like such a great idea, except that she's much less compelling and sympathetic as a young rookie), and a serious lack of time spent on the central characters we've come to know. The starts and stops of the many, many characters POVs make for a jumbled narrative and a frustrating reading experience, and they detract from both the cleanness of the plotting and any emotional response we might've had to the characters. I'm frankly very surprised that a Slaughter book would be this messy.

Eventually, the central mystery is an interesting one, if a bit on the predictable side. The little we see of the Will/Sara/Angie dynamic continues to be fascinating. The flashback sections that took place in the 70s did provide a few good things: it was kind of neat to see Evelyn Mitchell's early career since we all know how it later turns out, a bit about Will's early beginnings, and through Amanda, it was interesting to read about how female police officers were treated back then. But the issues of discrimination, as well as so many others, were done with a much less expert hand than I'm used to seeing in Slaughter's books. Even the level and detail of the violence, which the author's been criticized for and I've never had a problem with before, seemed unnecessarily extra brutal and verging on salacious here. For the first time in reading this author's work, I felt serious twinges of distaste as I read about various extremely violent crimes inflicted upon the victims; it's not what happens, as I've read similar levels of violence or worse, it's the repetitive way these things are presented to us, without the appropriate subsequent gravity and care to balance it out. When I think about the awful thing that happens to Lena's sister in the very first Slaughter book and how well the author handled both the procedural and emotional effects of that, I am especially surprised at how clumsily heavy-handed this new book seems to be.

So I would just say that if you're considering reading this series, definitely don't start with this one. They should be read in order anyway , and the others are much, much better. I'm still a big fan of this author's work, but for the first time, I'm going to be anticipating the next one with muted expectations. Fingers crossed she returns to her usual excellent form next year.

More About the Author

Karin Slaughter is a New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling author. She is a native of Georgia.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#41 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Mystery

#42 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Mystery & Thrillers > Mystery

#46 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Mystery & Thrillers > Thrillers

#53 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers

#62 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

#41 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Mystery

#42 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Mystery & Thrillers > Mystery

#46 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Mystery & Thrillers > Thrillers

#53 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers

#62 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense