Tag: Atlanta

Review 2628: #RIPXX: Fallen

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

When Will Trent’s partner Faith Mitchell goes to her mother’s house to pick up her baby, Emma, she can see something is wrong. Loud music is playing inside and there is blood on the door handle. When she goes to the shed to get her mother’s gun, the gun is gone and the baby is locked inside.

Entering the house, she finds a dead man in the laundry room. She is forced to shoot a man in the bedroom and another one threatening the neighbor’s kids in the next yard. Her mother is gone.

Faith can’t be on the case, but Will and his boss Amanda Wagner have different ideas about what’s going on. Amanda is sure the incident has to do with gang activity, as Evelyn Mitchell used to be in charge of the narcotics squad. But Will can’t help thinking it may have to do with the case he investigated against her squad for skimming drug money. Evelyn was not prosecuted like the others but retired. Will has always thought she was guilty, and a large amount of money has never been found.

On the personal side, his relationship with Sara Linton is heating up just as his wife Angie has reappeared after months of absence.

This novel is the fifth in the Will Trent series and is full of action. I like Will, but I am thinking of stopping, and I have several reasons for that. One is his relationship with Sara Linton. She was apparently a main character from a previous series, and Slaughter has brought her into this one slowly, starting with the third book. My problem with her is that Slaughter hasn’t really bothered much with developing her character, having presumably developed it in the previous series, and I haven’t read the previous series. Plus, we haven’t seen much of Angie at all in the series, but in this book she is so horrible that you can’t imagine anyone staying with her. I think Slaughter is just using her as a device. Also, a little romance in this kind of novel is okay, but there’s an awful lot of emphasis on it in this book.

Finally, this took longer to occur to me than it should have, but this is Atlanta, Georgia, yet all of the principal characters in this novel are White, except for the bad guys. I had some difficulty in my brief bit of research finding data for 2011, the publication date of the book, but Atlanta is about 50% Black in population. The GBI doesn’t publicize its statistics, but the current demographics of the APD exactly meet the percentage of Black people in the community. Back in 2011, the APD was about 30% Black, and in 2010 there were about a third more Black people than White people in the city (statistics may be different for the greater Atlanta area). Yet, there’s not a single Black or Hispanic main character in this book. The TV series has taken care of this by making Will Hispanic and both his boss and partner Black. In fact, the only main White characters are a much nicer Angie and Angie’s partner Ormewood (no Sara).

So, is Slaughter a bigot or writing for what she thinks her audience wants? (2011 isn’t that long ago.) I was also irked by how Faith has spent two books not eating when she is having trouble with her diabetes. Come on! In any case, with Sara moving in and this belated realization, I’m moving out. Let me add, though, that Slaughter writes a truly suspenseful, exciting book.

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Review 2449: The House Next Door

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Colquitt and Walter Kennedy are dismayed when they hear that the lot next door in their wealthy Atlanta neighborhood is being built on. They have relished it as a green buffer and have been assured that no one can built on it. However, the new owners have apparently found someone who can, Kim Dougherty, a young architect. Colquitt is the first to admit that the house he builds is strikingly unusual and beautiful. In fact, she understands its beauty much better than do the owners, Pie and Buddy Harrelson. As the house goes up, Colquitt and Walter develop a friendship with Kim.

I read this novel because I heard it was a good ghost story, but it’s not a ghost story as such—rather a haunting. As the house goes up, the bodies of small animals, ripped apart, appear, including that of Pie’s puppy. Pie falls down some unprotected stairs and has a miscarriage. When Kim finishes the house and moves on to other projects, he reports being unable to work. The Kennedys think he’s just burnt out and needs a rest, but he says it’s the house, that it takes whatever you value most. Then, on the night of the Harrelsons’ house-warming party, a dreadful event occurs.

When the next family moves in. Buck and Anita Sheehan, Colquitt feels that Anita looks haunted. The neighborhood soon finds out that Anita spent time in a mental hospital after the couple’s son died in the Vietnam War. (The novel was written in the 1970s.) Soon enough, Colquitt and eventually Walter start to believe that Kim may be right about the house. The problem is what to do about it.

I am not familiar with Siddons, so I don’t know if she generally writes about the privileged. The Kennedys are not wealthy according to themselves, but they both have generous salaries and they live among the rich. There are times when the novel reflects a sort of exclusiveness and self-satisfaction that is not flagrant but is there. The Kennedys run into a class wall when they try to warn people about the house, but all this surfaces at the end in an unusual way.

The ending of this novel takes a startling turn that opens up the reader’s interpretations of the actions of the novel and makes you rethink. I think this put it higher in my regard than it would have if it had gone where I expected it to. It made me reconsider the whole story.

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Review 2316: Undone

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Will Trent has taken his partner Faith Mitchell to the hospital because she passed out. While he is waiting, an ambulance brings in a woman who has been hit by a car. She is naked and has obviously been kept captive somewhere and been tortured. Even more horribly, her eleventh rib has been removed.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has to be invited into a case, but Will drives to the crime scene, which is only being investigated near the road. The police try to send him away, but he enters the nearby woods to try to find where the woman was escaping from. He finds a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of plywood. Inside the man-made cave, he finds indications that two women were there. Eventually, he finds a second woman hanging upside down from a tree, dead. This woman has been blinded.

Back at the hospital, the doctor, Sara Linton (who apparently is the heroine of a different series by Slaughter), tells Faith she is diabetic. This condition is complicated because Faith is also pregnant.

For his part, Will has married his lover Angie, but she took off almost immediately afterwards. To his dismay, Will finds Sara, a widow, attractive.

As Will and Faith try to identify the victims, with the local police withholding evidence, another woman disappears. Because she physically resembles both victims, Will and Faith think she might be another victim of the same person.

This is another fast moving and interesting entrant to this series about a dyslexic detective and his partner.

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Review 2270: Fractured

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Fractured is Slaughter’s second novel featuring Will Trent, the dyslexic detective from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

When wealthy Abigail Campano returns home early from her lunch date, she finds the window by her front door smashed and her teenage daughter lying dead at the top of the stairs with her apparent attacker standing over her holding a knife. In the resulting struggle, Abigail and the man with the knife both fall downstairs, and Abigail manages to kill him.

The Atlanta police have trampled all over the crime scene before Will Trent arrives to determine whether the GBI should be involved in the case. It’s Will who discovers the young man had been stabbed before Abigail arrived and was trying to help the girl. Then Paul Campano arrives and realizes the girl is not his daughter Emma at all but probably Kayla, her best friend.

Unfortunately, Will grew up with Paul in a children’s home. Paul was a bully then and is extremely aggressive now.

The Atlanta police are taken off the case, but Will’s boss attaches Faith Mitchell from the APD to work with Will. It takes him a while to realize that she is the granddaughter of a woman who was forced to retire after Will caught six of her APD officers stealing drug money.

The case becomes a kidnapping case, beginning with a search to identify the dead man. The Campanos have never seen him before. What was he doing in their house and where is Emma?

This novel is another exciting entry in this well-written and carefully plotted series. Will is an interesting character, and Faith begins to respect his abilities.

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Review 2178: Triptych

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

I have to admit, I looked for this first Will Trent novel after getting hooked on the TV series. Just a little warning: if you have already watched the series, the TV folks have made one major change from the book that may surprise you.

In Atlanta, young teenage girls have been found after being raped, beaten, and having their tongues either partially or completely bitten off. Detective Michael Ormewood is called out to a similar case, only this time the woman is dead, and she’s not a teenage girl but a middle-aged prostitute.

The next day, Ormewood meets Will Trent, a Special Agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He will be working the case with Ormewood. Will is unusual because he is dyslexic, although he tries to keep this problem a secret.

In the meantime, John Shelley has been recently released from prison, where he served 25 years for a similar crime, committed when he was 16. John has always maintained his innocence, right up to his last parole hearing when he wanted to get out before his mother died of cancer. John has been out for only a short time when he learns that someone has stolen his identity, but curiously, used it to apply for credit cards and buy things while keeping a good credit score.

Angie Polaski, a detective on the vice squad, has gotten peripherally involved in the investigation. She has ties to both Ormewood and Trent that she’s keeping secret.

This is a well-written, fast-paced novel that is part mystery, part thriller. It has interesting characters, and I enjoyed it very much.

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