“Breathless tension!” raved the San Francisco Chronicle. “One of [the year’s] most remarkable achievements,” crowed the Philadelphia Inquirer. Karin Slaughter dazzled readers and critics alike with Triptych, her New York Times bestselling suspense novel set in metropolitan Atlanta. Now the #1 internationally bestselling author returns to the damaged landscape she knows so well in a bold new novel—at once a powder keg of suspense, a gritty portrait of a cop’s life, and a searing exploration of a shocking crime and its aftermath…

With its gracious homes and tree-lined streets, Ansley Park is one of Atlanta’s most desirable neighborhoods. But in one gleaming mansion, in a teenager’s lavish bedroom, a girl has been savagely murdered. And in the hallway, her horrified mother stands amid shattered glass, having killed her daughter’s attacker with her bare hands.

Detective Will Trent of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is here only to do a political favor; the murder site belongs to the Atlanta police. But Trent soon sees something that the cops are missing, something in the trail of blood, in a matrix of forensic evidence, and in the eyes of the shell-shocked mother. Within minutes, Trent is taking over the case—and adding another one to it. He is sure that another teenage girl is missing, and that a killer is on the loose.

Armed with only fleeting clues, teamed with a female cop who has her own personal reasons for hating him, Trent has enemies all around him—and a gnawing feeling that this case, which started in the best of homes, is cutting quick and deep through the ruins of perfect lives broken wide-open: where human demons emerge with a vengeance.

"At the start of bestseller Slaughter's heart-pounding sequel to 2006's Triptych, wealthy housewife Abigail Campano returns home one day to Atlanta's posh Ansley Park neighborhood to find a dead girl in the mansion's upstairs hallway, the apparent killer nearby. Thinking that the girl is her teenage daughter, Emma, the distraught Abby kills the alleged attacker only to realize that the murdered girl is not Emma, but Emma's friend, Kayla Alexander. Agent Will Trent of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation soon determines that he has a murder and kidnapping on his hands. Paired with Det. Faith Mitchell, Trent scrambles to put the pieces together and find Emma before it's too late. Slaughter brings the same raw energy and brutal violence that distinguishes her Grant County series (Beyond Reach, etc.) to this new series with chilling results, while Trent and Mitchell, a pair of complex and deeply flawed heroes, will leave fans clamoring for the next installment. (July)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Karin Slaughter's "Fractured" is a superior crime novel because Slaughter writes well on several levels. It's first and foremost a police procedural that describes in impressive detail efforts to find the person or persons who killed one Atlanta teenager and kidnapped another. The investigators are tormented by thoughts of the horrors that rich, attractive, 17-year-old Emma Campano may be suffering... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) as the hours pass. But more than most crime novelists, Slaughter is also interested in relationships, and she describes many complex ones among her characters. Finally, Slaughter, who has lived in Atlanta for a number of years, gives a sense of that city's people, mood and history. All this adds up to a crime novel that is denser, more challenging and ultimately more rewarding than most.

After a morning of tennis, Abigail Campano returns to her mansion in Atlanta's exclusive Ansley Park neighborhood to find a man with a knife standing over a bloody body that she takes to be her daughter, Emma. A struggle ensues, and the furious mother kills the intruder. Only after police arrive do terrible truths become clear. First, the dead girl isn't Emma but her friend Kayla, beaten beyond recognition. Emma, blood patterns make clear, has been carried away. Moreover, the dead boy wasn't the killer: He was a friend of one of the girls, and his death at the mother's hands was a tragic mistake. From the first, this is not a simple case.

Because Emma has been kidnapped, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation takes over from the rival Atlanta Police Department. This makes Will Trent of the GBI, who has appeared in one of Slaughter's previous novels, the lead investigator, with Atlanta police detective Faith Mitchell assigned to work with him. Soon complicated relationships emerge. Trent's investigation into corruption in the police department forced the retirement of Faith's mother, and the younger woman despises him, at least at the outset. Trent and the missing girl's father, Paul Campano, grew up hating one another in an Atlanta orphanage — and not much has changed in their middle age. Campano, thanks to his marriage to heiress Abigail, has advanced from car salesman to millionaire auto dealer. His wife despises him for his many affairs, but shared anguish over their missing child draws them back together. We learn, too, that Trent, a first-rate detective, has a secret: Thanks to a combination of dyslexia and poor schooling, he's illiterate but clever enough to hide his weakness from almost everyone.

The search for Emma comes to focus on the exclusive private school she attended and on Georgia Tech, where the dead boy was a student. Along the way, Slaughter gives us snatches of Southern vernacular: One detective could "pretty much talk the fleas off a dog." We feel the Atlanta heat: "It was like rolling yourself in honey and then walking into a kiln." We visit Emma's school and meet teachers with dark secrets in their past. We learn that after the Civil War, when the city's best families could no longer send their children to Boston or London to be educated, "recently impoverished debutantes realized that they actually had marketable skills and started opening up private schools along Ponce de Leon Avenue." Slaughter is one of the most tough-minded writers around when it comes to the ugly realities of crime, but she also has a nice eye for details of women's lives.

The two key questions looming over the novel — who kidnapped Emma, and is she still alive? — must not be answered here, but it is not too much to say that Slaughter's villains include a man who uses a position of authority to prey on vulnerable young women. There are many such men, she tells us, and they do terrible harm not only to the women they kill but also to those they leave scarred for life. And to their families as well; nothing in the novel is stronger than the portrait of the missing girl's anguished parents.

In 2001, I reviewed Slaughter's first novel, "Blindsighted," which concerned a rapist and murderer who was terrorizing women in a Georgia town. It was a violent book, but the violence was never gratuitous or used, as it sometimes is, to provide cheap thrills. Rather, Slaughter was clearly furious about rape, murder and other outrages against women. She does much the same in "Fractured," except she's more confident now and the novel is richer and more ambitious. Still in her 30s, Slaughter continues to be angry, fiercely focused and one of the most talented young crime novelists.

Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers(at symbol)aol.com., Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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“Startling twists…. [The detectives’s] quirky relationship—as much as the increasingly intriguing investigation—fuels this fun read.”People

“Fractured dazzles because it works on the level of both plot and character…. [And] the combination is unbeatable.”Cleveland Plain-Dealer

“Unexpected twists and intriguing characters.”Entertainment Weekly

Slaughter, one of the best crime novelists in America ("Washington Post"), brings back the characters from her "New York Times"-bestselling work "Triptych" for a shocking showdown of heart-stopping suspense.

Karin Slaughter is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of Beyond Reach, Triptych, Faithless A Faint Cold Fear, which was named an International Book-of-the-Month Club selection, Indelible, Kisscut and Blindsighted; she contributed to and edited Like a Charm. She is a native of Georgia, where she currently lives and is working on her next novel.