About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

KISSCUT
by Karin Slaughter
William Morrow & Co., September 2002
352 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0688174590


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

There were those who felt Slaughter's first novel was so graphic and so violent that they did not wish to read it in spite of the advance praise and the exemplary writing. They will find this book even more to their distaste, I fear. Nonetheless I found it a powerful and masterful novel which deals with the world in which we leave, tragic as that may be.

The story opens at a local hangout for teenagers in Heartsdale. Dr. Sara Linton finds what would have been a viable fetus dead in the womens' restroom, where someone had attempted to flush it down the toilet. Outside the skating parlor, a teenage girl Jenny Weaver holds a gun on Mark Patterson, threatening to kill him. Police Chief Jeffrey Tolliver acts in the only way he can.

This terrible tragedy is only the beginning of the nightmare which leads to some of the most horrible sexual abuse it is possible to imagine. The novel rips opens the veil with which we usually shroud such activities and forces us to imagine the unimaginable. It is harsh, direct, brutal, and it would be easier to not face the truths that Slaughter presents to us. But we cannot ignore them; we cannot close our eyes and pretend they do not exist.

Slaughter writes superb prose which flows and transports the reader into the story and never once jars her out of it. The images are so sharp that they have the power to injure. The dialogue is true to life and the style never gets in the way of the story although sometimes we wish it would.

Perhaps the most noteworthy part of the book are the characters. All of them are believable, three dimensional, flawed human beings. Each of the three "heroes" is damaged in one way or another. Often that means characters with whom the reader cannot empathize but that is not true here. Sara was married to Jeffrey once and still loves him. And yet she is afraid of committing herself again. Part of her problem is that she cannot have children and this means the events in the story poison her in ways others may not understand. Jeffrey is nearly destroyed by what he is forced to do early in the story and may never be whole again. His foremost detective Lena Adams was a victim in the last novel and she still carries deep scars because of what happened to her. No one shrugs off violence and death and bounces back better than before.

This is one of the most realistic books I have ever read with powerful characters and a complex plot that leads the reader into the most appalling segments of the human soul, to damaged and wounded people who may never heal. The book is cathartic and when I finished I was glad I had read it at the same time that I knew I would never see the world in quite the same way again. Slaughter pulls no punches while she shows us a world we would rather not see. Many will choose not to read this, but I found it both unsettling and powerful.

Reviewed by Sally A. Fellows, November 2002

This book has more than one review. Click here to show all.

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]