Rating: 
Summary: THE BEST THRILLER WRITER AROUND
Review: Karin Slaughter only gets better. A stunningly good second book (which is rare). Plotting, characters, excitement and lots of terror at every turn. I can't wait for her third (I hope there's one in the works). I won't give away any of the surprises but I heard every beat of my heart and every creak in my house the night I stayed up reading until done. Superb!
Rating: 
Summary: Everything you don't want in a thriller
Review: Boring, predictable, bogged down in painfully irrelevant character development, slow moving, full of trite dialogue, long on unnecessary or simplistic details, short on key details. It was tough finishing this book and the only real surprise is how bad this effort is.
Rating:
Summary: Shocking and page turner
Review: I enjoyed this book. I could not sleep one night so I started this book. Big mistake!! Read till 2am. Good plot and worth the money.
Rating: 
Summary: Thrilling suspenseful addition to the series
Review: I was surprised to read all the negative comments about this book, because I enjoyed the story very much. I personally found the close examination of the characters, particularly Lena and her uncle, very interesting and relevant to the story line. I kept asking myself- how would I act if I were recovering from a brutal attack/rape? Lena and Sara both are trying to get on with their lives the best way they knew how after suffering similar attacks. Jeffrey is also recovering from the shock and guilt of having to shoot a teenager. All of these people may not be acting in likeable ways, but that does not mean that those ways are unjustified given their circumstances. Yes the novel does not have a neat happy ending (i.e.-all culprits apprehended; justice served) but again, in real life neat happy endings do not often happen. Finally, the theme of the novel, organized child abuse and pornography, might not be as fascinating to some readers as serial killer murders, but if the author constantly wrote about the same kind of crime, readers would be complaining that she doesn't try anything new. I did not enjoy this book as much as Blindsighted, but I still thought it was good and I look forward to the next in the series.
Rating:
Summary: Sloppy and unoriginal.
Review: This story and the message behind it have been done better at least twenty five times before. I don't expect mysteries to copy real life. But I do like them to at least pretend to be real enough so that I care about the characters or the outcome. A book doesn't have to get the facts right on every front to be involving, but when an author gets just about everything wrong there is just no way I can suspend my disbelief and enjoy the story. Which is what happens here. The book suffers from a lack of research on every front and because of that it never builds a world I can care about and comes off as plastic entertainment with no real soul. The meager attention paid to the law enforcement angle in the story shows an appalling lack of knowledge or sloppiness on the author's part. The medical sections are almost as bad and are obviously faked and badly set-up in the first place. The cops and professional ethics would keep the female protagonist from ever doing the plot-critical autopsy in real life. Even the abuse sections which are the crux of the book come off as phony with the wounds inflicted and conspiracies abounding eventually becoming so over the top that it demeans the subject matter of real abuse and mutiliation. All the violent scenes in this book come off like weirdly disjointed additions to the writing. They are nothing but literary band aids slapped on to make the book more exciting. They don't. Then you have stereotypes as characters. An ex-husband and ex-wife bantering to create sexual tension is not very original. And you have a stereotypical setting in a seemingly innocent small town that seethes with hidden secrets. Pretentious flights in characterization drag down the story too often and there's a Hollywoodish solution/ending that is also not very original. The worst thing about it is a weird distance to the writing that discourages any emotional attachment to the book. I don't think writers have to only write about what they know about and I don't think that writing about what you know guarantees a good book. But if you try to fake it, you better at least have some empathy for the people and emotions you are trying to create if you hope to pull it off. This book does not pull it off and is a disappointment.
Rating: 
Summary: A Disapointment
Review: After enjoying Blindsighted I was looking forward to Karin Slaughter's new book. It turned out to be a huge disappointment to me and the title did not seem really relevant to the plot. If you had not read her previous book you would have difficulty with the characters in this one, especialy Lena, since it takes up where the other one left off. I could not totally recall what had happened to her previously, which caused her such focused distress in this book. Sara and Jeff seemed to be inept in their fields and, again, we were supposed to remember what had gone before.Since this book was assumed to be dealing with child abuse and kiddie porn it barely skimmed the surface of this heinous subject and seemed to be less focused on what the real object of the plot was and more focused on trivialities.The adult characters all seemed child-like and there wasn't really one likable person in this book.It all led to a very fragmented ending which rather summecd up what was wondered all along in a very disjointed manner. The ending led me to believe that there is yet another Sara,Jeff,et al in the offing,which will be a continuation of this. One only hopes that they will get their many problems resolved before then.
Rating:
Summary: Very, very, very over-touted work
Review: While Blindsighted showed some promise, Slaughter's follow-up book loses points. She makes a number of mistakes. First, there's far too much time spent on truly unlikeable characters. Second, the two protagonists are cardboard cutouts. No? Try imagining them as friends for a minute ... Couldn't happen, as there's just not enough substance. Third, there's too little action and too much character background, one inner conflict after another, *endless* self-questioning, which is meant to show their depth I guess but only makes them look weak and unsure. Forth, I had A LOT of problems with sloppy, unrealistic procedures, as though the town wasn't staffed by professionals but was using the butcher to sub as the sheriff and the local school teacher as the doctor. Finally, a lot of the dialogue seemed forced, and some actually made me cringe. I'm not sure I'd even buy the paperback on this one.
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Summary: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery -- NOT here!
Review: As much as I want to like Slaughter, I just can't get into her books. The subject, while relevant, has been covered before and much better -- see ANYTHING by Andrew Vachss, especially the BURKE novels. The "medical-examiner" chic prose has been done before, and better -- see the "Scarpetta" novels, by Patricia Cornwell. And the characters are too unbelievable and coarsely drawn to inspire any emotion for them. The character dialogue and interaction seems stiff, as evidenced in the excerpt posted here. And the "graphic detail" often touted in "reviews" seems to be borderline gratuitous. Slaughter has no credentials in forensics or law enforcement and this book highlights those deficiencies. The reviewers that have compared her to Cornwell, Vachss, and Reichs do those three authors a major disservice. Imitation may be "the sincerest form of flattery" but not in this case.
Rating:
Summary: absorbing mystery
Review: It's hard for me to say much about this book without sounding ike the dust jacket or giving away the plot. The Characters from Blindsighted are back, picking up where we left off. I loved the writing -- the characters really felt alive to me, and the plot pulled me forward so that I finished the book in an afternoon. My only reservation is that, looking backwards from the resolution, some of the plot elements seemed not to make as much sense as I would like. I would, nevertheless, highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Booooor-rrrringggggg
Review: Honestly, I don't see the great reviews. Patricia Cornwell comparisons? This writer doesn't begin to approach that league. Cornwell's pacing is superb, regardless of how far-fetched she gets these days. There are countless problems with this book and no amount of gore and shock is going to change that. Where to start? Believability and procedural oversights. The action starts when a character is forced to shoot a teenager. I never felt that mortally wounding the child was the only option. Once it was done, it was unlikely that the shooter's ex-wife/current sweetheart of a coroner would do the autopsy. (For that matter, why wasn't an investigation of the shooting launched?) The child abuse that is apparently rampant in this town makes the pediatrician, who happens to be our heroine, look like a complete incompetent. She had NO idea of the abuse and in fact we learn that some of her examinations took place over clothing. A small point here: would parents involved in their children's abuse really make sure the kids got their annual or semiannual checkups? There were moments where the guilt-ridden doctor comforted the guilt-ridden shooter and vice versa. Could either one take comfort from the other without lying? Slaughter seemed scared or put off by her own material. She plunges into some hard descriptions, while others are simply "unspeakable." There just wasn't a consistent, satisfying clinical air to the facts and Sarah is a doctor, and I felt there should have been. I felt the forensic research in Blindsighted, the author's first book, was much stronger. The author also has a tendency to put in too much irrelevant character development, which slows down the action to an excruciating point. Lena, an abused and tormented police officer, and her unappealing alcoholic uncle, take up far too much of the book. They just aren't sympathetic enough for us to care that much. Finally, and this isn't Slaughter's fault, with the headlines filled with stories of abused children, I just wanted a fresher idea. What might have been shocking two years ago is just too familiar today.
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