Reviews with content warning for Rape - Girl, Forgotten

Karin Slaughter can be a little bit hit and miss for me, but this one kept me engaged and intrigued from beginning to end. It's nowhere near as gory as her usual fare either, as she is well known for in-depth and graphic details of murders, tortures and abuses. This absolutely has the murder, but there aren't many graphic details at all and there's none of the frequently found escalation into torture horror.

Emily was only 17 when she was attacked and left for dead whilst heavily pregnant. Nobody knew who the father was, perhaps not even Emily herself. Or so it seemed. Yet someone had motive enough to kill her. Some forty years later, Andrea is sent to the scene under the guise of protecting the dead girl's grandmother from death threats. In reality, if she can prove her own father killed the girl all those years go, she will be able to prevent him leaving prison and ever threatening them again. But it's a forty year cold case. Information was slim on the ground then and it isn't going to be any easier now.

It's a well written thriller that has several competing narrative lines, with all of them being interesting and competing for Andrea's attention. In between we get interludes from four decades ago from Emily's perspective, bringing additional detail to the old case but no real answers. The juxtaposition between present and past is done well, and the chapters from Emily help bring the forty years older adults into perspective, highlighting their personalities as Emily knew them. The characters all felt real, although many of them are certainly not people you'd want to get to know well.

So, a strong and relatively tame Karin Slaughter novel. There's apparently an initial thriller looking in more detail at Andrea's background and her father. That's now also on my to-read list!

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rmistry75's review

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dark emotional mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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shasta2292's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Never have a met a cast of more genuinely awful human beings. Just terrible.

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bookishchaos's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

The story needed more structure. It was either all over the place or very slow moving. Most of the "serious" characters in this book were actually goofy and pretty annoying.

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