Rating: 
Summary: Her best yet!
Review: 95 % of this book was captivating; the characters and the plot were wonderful. While it's a cliche, it was truly hard to put down. Sara is a physician, "girlfriend, sister, friend and daughter with each facet of her character well-drawn. However, the character Lena has (to me) a very confusing resolution at the end. It certainly makes one wait for the next book with baited breath!
Rating: 
Summary: A real step down for Karin Slaughter.
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: The latest installment in a hard hitting series.
Review: A Faint Cold Fear opens dramatically, as Slaughter's series character, medical examiner Sara Linton, is called to a local college to investigate the apparent suicide of a student. By happenstance, Sara's very pregnant sister Tessa is in the car when the call comes, and asks to tag along. Caught up in her examination of the body, and in discussion with her ex-husband, Police Chief Jeffrey Tolliver, Sara loses track of Tessa. Realizing she has been gone for quite a while, Sara seeks her out, only to find her lying semi-conscious on the ground in the nearby woods, the victim of a vicious knife attack. Critically wounded, Tessa is rushed to the hospital for treatment.The body count rises as the novel progresses, as the campus experiences a rash of shocking student deaths. Still stunned by the attack on Tessa, Sara and Jeffrey investigate each succeeding death, struggling to make some sense of it all. The answers they piece together are as disturbing as they are surprising. Slaughter grabs her readers' attention early, giving them little reason to relinquish it as the book speeds towards it grim conclusion, unflinchingly presenting murder scenes, autopsies, and the wreckage of her main characters' personal lives. Slaughter's characters feel the impact of events described in this and previous novels; their attempts to work things out, to make sense of a senseless world, provides plenty of drama and pathos. Slaughter lavishes a great deal of attention on supporting character Lena Adams, who's been traumatized by a kidnapping and rape that occurred in a previous installment of this series. It's hard to predict whether readers will feel sympathy or revulsion for Lena, but Slaughter should be given credit for taking the risks she does in this novel. Her unsentimental depiction of Lena, and indeed of all involved, are indeed reason enough to sample her canon.
Rating:
Summary: Should Have Been Much Better
Review: a troubling story in which the author supplies a cast of characters who ALL seem to have sexual-physical-mental abuse in their backgrounds, which affects their jobs and their personal relationships a little too much; it's very hard to empathize with a cast composed of totally wacko characters and leads one to question the authors background; does she really see the world as she presents it? or is she just trying too hard to shock for better book sales? such as the "kicker" ending in which Lena is revealed as having killed her boss after she had already disabled him and defended herself from his attempted physical abuse
Rating: 
Summary: Despicable, unrealistic characters
Review: After reading Kisscut, I thought that I'd found a new author to add to my list of frequent reads. In Kisscut, I was able to overlook the unlikeability of Slaughter's characters because the rest of the book was pretty interesting. In A Faint Cold Fear, though, the despicable, unrealistic, miserable characters completely overwhelm the purported plot of the book. It's not merely that Slaughter's characters are "unsympathetic" or "unlikeable" as other reviewers have commented, it's that they behave completely irrationally and in ways that I can only hope no real person would.
Although I NEVER give up on a book before finishing it, I put this one down half way through, and I will not purchase Slaughter again.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book, bad ending
Review: Called in to investigate the apparent suicide of a male Grant Tech student, Dr. Sara Linton brings along her pregnant sister, Tessa, who wanders away from the scene and is brutally attacked. The distraught Sara must work side by side with her ex-husband, Det. Jeffrey Tolliver, whom she loves despite his past infidelity, but it's Lena Adams, formerly a cop and now a campus security guard, whose story the novel follows most closely. Still mourning the murder of her sister and recovering from her own torture and rape by the same man, Lena is looked on with suspicion by her ex-boss, Jeffrey. With reason: she's hiding a few key facts. The dead boy's mother is her therapist and Lena is involved with an abusive young man with a shady past. Campus gossip Richard Carter further confuses investigators; meanwhile, police discover the bodies of two more students, their deaths potentially suicides but more likely murder.
After speedreading through her first two books, I was excited to get my hands on her third novel. Her first two books were great, but this one just didn't measure up. The book was good up until the last fifty pages or so. The ending was a big letdown.
Rating:
Summary: Extremely overrated author
Review: Contrived situations, absurd and extremely unlikeable characters -- there wasn't much I cared for about this book. The murders were piling on so fast it became numbing, the gore was so extreme it had the opposite effect of adding realism. If you want a small-town view of a big, bad crime, this might be the book for you, but it's not very good. It got to be a little too "sticks and hicks" for me.
Rating:
Summary: nice strong novel from Slaughter - promising indeed
Review: Every decade or so writers come along who smash themselves a niche in the bestseller lists (often, some say, regardless of quality). In the 70's, it was Stephen King, the late eighties John Grisham, the early nineties Patricia Cornwell, and the late nineties saw James Patterson burst to huge almost unimaginable mega-bestsellerdom. Karin Slaughter (only with the right marketing, of course) could possibly be the first name of the 20th century to be added to that list, whether she really deserves it or not. A Faint Cold Fear though, certainly, displays a growing maturity to Slaughter's work that is pleasing indeed to behold. Gone is the slightly slapdash plotting of Blindsighted, gone is the stark rawness of Kisscut, and even the quality of the writing itself continues to improve bit-by-bit. It begins with a suicide. A college student is dead, having leaped from a bridge on campus. At first, nothing seems very out of the ordinary to medical examiner Sara Linton, but then someone suffers a horrific attack, and the whole affair is cast in a new disturbing light. Two more suspicious suicides follow, but nothing seems to point anywhere specific at all. There are vague leads pointing to drugs, possibly jealousy, maybe even racial hatred, but nothing very strong or concrete. However, it quickly becomes apparent that Lena Adams - ex-police detective and now part of the college security team - may hold crucial information. But, bruised and bitter from her expulsion from the force, Lena is still very much damaged by the events which led up to her downfall, and even if she were keen to co-operate with Chief of police Jeffery Tolliver, it is clear that she may not even be capable, in herself, of doing so. One of this series' most obvious strengths - for me, anyway- is its central trinity, all of whom are fascinating. They're not always 100% believable (to be honest, they seem to have a few too many "issues", very interesting to read about though those issues may make them) but they are still entertaining and more than capable of sustaining this series for a very long time indeed. That there are three central characters means that things can remain fresh and new and interesting for a lot longer than in other series'. Sara stays the level-headed moral arbiter, Jeffery remains the sometimes temperamental dispenser of justice, and Lena the damaged and tortured soul who likes to appear strong and who is just trying to cope (badly) in her own confused way. Indeed, Lena is either a character you will love or hate. She can be rather prickly and stubborn, and, admittedly, has a great many woes, but she is slowly beginning to grow on me. Although maybe that's because Slaughter certainly doesn't treat her very well at all in this book, and hasn't really for the entire series! The bottom line is that this is a successful, satisfying novel with enough forensic detail to give it that Cornwellesque edge and a good, involving, twisty story. Oh, yes, and it does have a shocking last-paragraph sting in its tail that'll have you gasping. Slaughter appears to have hit her stride.
Rating:
Summary: Didn't like it
Review: First book I have read from this author: too much gratuitous violence and the characters were never sympathetic....I kept on reading to find out what happened but would not read another from her.
Rating:
Summary: Didn't like it
Review: First book I have read from this author: too much gratuitous violence and the characters were never sympathetic....I kept on reading to find out what happened but would not read another from her.
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