Customer Reviews

A Faint Cold Fear

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

When a story begins with two sisters, Sara and Tessa, going for ice cream to the Dairy Queen, don't be misled that this book will be different from Karin Slaughter's previous tales!!
A Faint Cold Fear is another story centering on Sara Linton, a practicing pediatrician and also the town's Medical Examiner, as well as the ex-wife of Jeffrey Tolliver, the Chief of Police.
When questions are raised over a death that looked like an obvious suicide and when someone close to Sara is attacked, you know that the mystery is only beginning. A second suicide/murder (?!?) leads into an intricate web of deceit.
Along with the investigation, Sara's relationship with Jeffrey becomes more defined, even as an old boyfriend of Sara's pops back into the picture.
Lena Adams is now working security for the local college, no longer an investigator for the Police Dept. Lena's dysfunctional life places her squarely in the center of a major murder investigation.....and only a few people will see the whole picture.
New unsettling characters are introduced into this series!!
Murder is not a pretty picture. Karin Slaughter writes with a vivid pen revealing the gravity and despair that surround the victims and their families and the graphic details that bring a horrifying reality to the crimes. Don't expect her to pull her punches!!

This is the third installment in Slaughter's Grant County series featuring Sara Linton. The story moves at a fast pace, never letting you go. A page-turner. If characterization and realistic dialogue are key to what you enjoy most out of your fiction, Slaughter is the author for you to try. I found her first book engrossing and her second book was a page-turner. The third is no different. She is an author to watch. I find her style unique and original. She is one of the few authors that I anticipate a new novel from and buy & read without reading reviews.

She is not overrated as some reviewers have stated. I find her voice refreshing and yes, the violence level was extremely high in this book but overall, it did not shadow my enjoyment whatsoever. Lena's still struggling to find peace within herself and might have stepped over the line in this installment. She meets her match in Ethan, who seems to identify with her on some level that only the two of them understand. The friendship and respect between Jeffrey Tolliver and Lena Adams is stretched thin here stemming from events from the previous installment and in this book as well. At times it was exhausting to see Lena's struggle to find herself, to come to grips with her past. Sara Linton and her ex-husband, Jeff Toliver are still together and might even be thinking of marriage again. Their romance is nice.

If this is your first time hearing of Karin Slaughter, this is not the book to start with and I recommend that you read them in order to get a better feel for the atmosphere, the characters. I am amazed that a few reviewers who posted seemed to think that the characters are unlikable. I don't agree. Slaughter is only one of the few writers who puts out thrillers with the emphasis on her characters. She gets great endorsements from authors I've enjoyed and respected like Michael Connelly who I just discovered this year and love.

My grade was an A. Outstanding follow-up to last year's KISSCUT and I look forward to INDELIBLE. If I had any problems with this installment---it was the violence. It was excessive and often I wondered if the author was trying to see how much she could gross us out as there were quite a few gross out moments. Overall, great book Ms. Slaughter. The series is very well written thus far. I only hope that the violence level is toned down in future books. Thank You.

The setting is a small college campus in the small town of Heartsdale, Georgia. The story opens with a student's apparent suicide and the stabbing of the protagonist's sister. More suspicious suicides follow and violence permeates Grant College.

This is the third in the series featuring medical examiner Sara Linton, Police Chief Jeffrey Tolliver, and ex-police detective Lena Adams. Sara and Jeffrey were once married, but are still involved romantically with other. Lena was victim of a horrific crime in KISSCUT, and is still emotionally broken in A FAINT COLD FEAR. It really helps if you read the previous novels to understand all these characters are going through. The characters are fully drawn and three-dimensional with both good and bad traits just like most people. I wish the violence was less graphic, but the story was very involving and quite suspenseful. It's a fast-paced book that is hard to put down until the very end.

A Faint Cold Fear is ostensibly about a series of deaths that look like suicide, but could be murder, and the investigation into the connection between them. But this plot seems to be abandoned for great stretches of time so that we can wallow in the misery that is Lena Adams. She suffered a brutal rape in Blindsighted, the first novel, but the closing chapters of Kisscut suggested a beginning to her recovery.

No such luck. While you could not expect somebody to recover from something like what Lena went through, we delve into her mindset at the total expense of plot. It feels like the murders are there as an afterthought to try and tie this book into the lucrative "crime novel" market. Because I would not call this a crime novel. The crimes are solved in a totally "Scooby-Doo" manner, with an unintentionally funny surprise "Scooby-Doo" villian. The real focus is on Lena, her self-loathing and her continuing self-destruction. It got tiresome VERY quickly. I eventually started skim-reading Lena's chapters so I could get back to what I thought was a crime novel.

Blindsighted and Kisscut are disturbing, well-crafted thrillers and worth reading. But A Faint Cold Fear is a real step down. The crime aspect is woefully lacking, and the focus on Lena gets infuriating. But Slaughter's fans shouldn't give up hope - Indelible is a decent read, and Lena seems remarkably recovered.

From other reviewers you can get the general jist of the story. I have read Karen Slaughter's other 2 books and this is definitely the best of the 3 (so far). I can definitely feel her growth as a writer in this one.

I know I like to read reviews here when I'm looking for a book to read so I'll put in my two cents worth and respond to some other points made here in these reviews.

I didn't find the characters annoying, I find what you don't know about them intriguing...but should we get to the "end" of the series someday and we know nothing...ok...that would be annoying, but I don't find that in her books. In each book she gives you a little more background on each character. Getting to know "all" about them requires watching them and hearing their thoughts as they go through their experiences. They are confronted with things they never expected to be confronted with in their lifetimes, and don't always respond as you "think" they will or as THEY thought they would.

Slaughters writing (to me) is satisfying but it's not tidy. You get the crime solved but not always totally. The characters stay sometimes in turmoil, or something you think was resolved resurfaces. I believe this all makes her writing and her characters more real...and her writing more interesting.

I don't find the violence excessive. Maybe I just know how she writes, she's detailed and yes, in detailing, it's graphic. You will leave a page with a definite picture of the crime scene. You won't have to use your imagination.

About the only thing about these books that kind of makes me chuckle and seems a bit of a stretch of my imagination, is that this series takes place in a small southern town where everyone knows each other. It's a bit of a stretch to believe that these horrific crimes happen over and over again and noone's got a clue. But hey, I'll get over it. I'm just glad I don't live there. <smile>.

Just my two cents for what is worth.

I had to struggle to keep my interest in this book until the end. But I finished it, with the hope that there would HAVE to be some amazing payoff in the end. I love Karin Slaughter, but I have to say, she really dropped the ball on this one. I was actually 87% of the way through the book (according to my Kindle) before it even got interesting. In the end, I was wrong. There was no real payoff.

Suicide is running rampant at the Grant Institute of Technology. But after three suspicious suicides in a row as well as a near-fatal stabbing, Grant County medical examiner Sara Linton has a score to settle.

If there's a multiple murderer stalking the college, she and her ex-husband, Police Chief Jeffrey Tolliver, will bring him or her to justice--even as the Linton Family struggles through its own crisis.

Add to this emotional mix the troubles of former detective Lena Adams, now a college security guard, who is sinking deeper into the myre of her own embattled psyche and acting out against Jeffrey, her former boss, whom she blames for her misfortunes.

In this third installment of the Grant County series, Slaughter has created a tense page-turner that at times portrays such raw emotions that it's uncomfortable to read. But the crimes are so
fascinating, so intricate, and the research so accurate that read it I did, with a vengeance. These characters are starting to feel like my own family. And when my nose wasn't in the book, I was talking about the characters as if they were real people.

As with the previous title, KISSCUT, this book is recommended for those with strong stomachs. Fans of Patricia Cornwell should enjoy it.

When Sara Linton, the medical examiner in a small town and her ex husband, police chief Jeffrey Tolliver are called in to investigate the apparent suicide of a student from the local college, they find almost no clues but rely on a gut feeling that something doesn't ring true. That is the start of a series of horrific suicides and murders, including the attempted murder of Sara's sister.The author has plotted this story well and has made herself completely at home with autopsy proceedures but I found it to be just too graphic and gory for my taste. Perhaps it needs readers with stronger stomachs than mine.

As a mystery writer, I've heard the name Karin Slaughter many times, but never found the time to read her series. I went at this backward - started with this one first - and fell in love with Ms. Slaughter's writing right away.

Sara Linton, pediatrician and part-time medical examiner in Heartsdale, Georgia, is a wonderful character. Although betrayed by her former husband, Jeffrey Tolliver, the Chief of Police, as medical examiner, she must work closely with him. In this book, she and Jeffrey seem to be moving toward one another and a possible reconciliation while trying to solve suspicious suicides at nearby Grant College.

The pace of the book is excellent, the story intriguing. The twist at the end was unexpected and a real thrill. In essence, this was one book I did not want to put aside. If I could have, I would have read it through in one sitting.

Murder, Suicide, or Tedium

Writers who work in the grim reaper/suspense/mystery genre have to walk a difficult line. Too little violence and the reader fails to connect with the dark side of the plot. Too much violence, especially if it is gratuitous, and the reader starts skipping paragraphs looking for relief. After all gruesome killings are a plot device, not an end in itself.

All forensic fiction is based on a mild exaggeration of the medical examiner's role. Quincey aside, few of them ever take an active investigative role in an investigation. Either the writer has to create a twist to make this believable, or the book is good enough that the reader will overlook the obvious.

In Karin Slaughter's stories of Sara Linton the 'twist' seems to be that someone close to Sara is drawn into the circle of victims. Otherwise, the picture of a pediatric physician who doubles as medical examiner and has enough time to track down killers would ring false. This worked in previous volumes but this time, faced with the fact that the crime that became Sara's raison d'etre, was entirely gratuitous. Far from advancing the plot it became the basis for a sub-plot that I found to be distracting as it was all about Sara's relationships and very little about the story itself.

Most of this novel is subplots anyway. Possibly the one that irritated me the most centered on Lena Adams, now ousted from the police force and working as security at the local university. With suicide/murders popping out of the woodwork, Lena, who has, over three volumes, earned the honor of 'chief flake and angry person,' manages to screw up each and every investigation. Even worse, the ending makes it clear that she will go on to make even bigger messes, as her personality continues to worsen.

At some point in this book I gave up. The investigation was often fragmented by devices that should have moved the plot forward, but instead it stayed stuck at mid-point for most of the novel. In the end the solution is pulled out of a hat with little sense of closure.

To sum up, if you like really grim forensic descriptions of injuries, plots that are more about the distress of the main character than about the crimes at hand, and great handfuls of self-destructive psychotic behavior, you will probably really enjoy A Faint Cold Fear. Personally I'm a bit disappointed and am not sure I will follow this series into it's projected fourth and fifth volumes.