Pieces of Her

Nobody has the ability to take your breath away as shockingly and suddenly as Karin Slaughter. She can menace you with a slow buildup of dread or she can spring violence on you suddenly and intensely. What makes it even more impressive is the fact that she pairs the action with characters that are heartbreakingly, chillingly real. Pieces of Her is her latest impressive stand-alone novel.

Andrea has been drifting along for 31 years. Her mother, Laura, has spent her quiet life as a speech therapist in the beachside town of Belle Isle. As the two are having lunch at the mall, violence erupts right in front of them. A very different, very brave Laura emerges right in front of Andrea’s eyes, and it’s all captured on cell phone video. show more Andrea is a puddle of fear, but Laura very calmly confronts a killer. Now the police have questions and people from Laura’s past are very interested. Because Laura hasn’t always been Laura. Andrea winds up on the run, trying to put together the puzzle of who her mother really is. Both of their lives may depend on it.

Slaughter manages to marry, complicated, nuanced characters with breakneck plotting and intense, in-the-moment violence that draws you as the reader into its midst and doesn’t allow you to view it from a detached distance. The story alternates between Andrea in the present and Laura 30 years in the past. After a start that is a little slower than her previous novels, the story quickly picks up the pace and will have you reading it in big gulps if not all at once.

As great as the action is, the characters are equally memorable. Slaughter takes the time to flesh out her characters without sacrificing pacing. We see that Andrea is kind of a mess and when she winds up on the run her need to get her act together is not just an existential thing but a matter of life and death. Likewise, when we first meet Laura from 30 years earlier, we see how she was molded into the woman she would become. Along with some twists and surprises, you see some parallels between mother and daughter.

Setting a plot in two different timelines that eventually merge is tricky to do well, but Slaughter does it flawlessly. There is not the sense of loss as you move from one timeline to another, but an urgency as each timeline informs and builds on the other. A good book will have you tearing through the pages and enjoying every minute. A great one lets you enjoy it even more as you reflect and relive it. Karin Slaughter has written a great one. Pieces of Her is one of the best books of 2018. Highly recommended.

I was provided a copy of this book by the publisher. show less

Pieces of Her by Karin Slaughter is a compelling and complicated character driven mystery that follows two timelines. This excellent novel is very highly recommended.

It is Andrea (Andy) Cooper's 31st birthday and she is meeting her mother, Laura, for breakfast at the Rise-n-Dine in the mall. Andy left NYC to move back home to help her when Laura told her she had cancer three years ago. Now Andy is living above her garage and working the night shift as a 911 operator in Belle Isle, Georgia. Truthfully, though, Andy sacrifice nothing moving back home. She acts much younger than her years and her life has been basically aimless and purposeless. She is swimming in college loan debt and she has trouble verbalizing her thoughts in show more conversations. It may be due to being the only child of high achieving parents. Her mother, Dr. Laura Oliver, is a speech therapist, while her father, Gordon, is a trusts and estates attorney. Now her mother is telling her it is time for her to move out, grow up, and make her own life.

While the idea that she is being kicked out of her mother's house is surprising, it is not as shocking as the whole different side to her mother that Andy experiences when a gunman comes into the diner and begins shooting, killing two women. Laura immediately jumps up and takes action, pushing Andy out of the way, trying to get the killer to shoot her, and then neatly and dispassionately dispatching him. Andy is in shock, her mother is hospitalized, and the police are asking questions. How well did Andy really know her mother, this woman who stepped up to stop a killer? And then her life becomes even more complicated when her mother sends her on the run and apparently has had a secret life in her past, a life that means she had to be prepared for contingencies that might require being on the run.

There are two timelines, the present day, with Andy on the run and in the 1980's when Laura went by another name and was part of a group of amateur terrorists. Both timelines are equally fraught with tension and new revelations. The suspense is acute and consuming as more secrets are revealed and new dangers loom. Andy begins her journey in shock and lacking many of the skills she needs to survive.

As expected, the writing is excellent and the plot is compelling and engrossing. Slaughter is well known for her sophisticated thrillers and Pieces of Her is a wonderful addition to her body of work. For those who want a thriller, there are enough heart-stopping moments to satisfy you, although I would describe Pieces of Her as more of a character driven mystery as it follows Andy on the run and reveals events in Laura's past.

The characters are extremely detailed and well-developed. They are presented as complete people, with secrets, weaknesses, doubts, flaws, and strengths. There is growth, especially in Andy, as she is tested and expected to act on her own without anyone to fall back on for the first time in her life. She is also, naturally, driven to uncover Laura's secret past and how it relates to them now and the current situation, as anyone would be if they discovered their mother might not be the person you've always thought she was.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HarperCollins.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2018/08/pieces-of-her.html show less

Karin Slaughter’s Bronx cheer to Millennials. It takes quite a push to get Laura’s 30 year old offspring Andrea out of her parent’s house, it appears. Andrea is the dorkiest creation since The New Girl.

However, as we look into Laura’s past, one sees that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Passivity seems to run in the family. She’s been seduced by the left wing of the Boomer Generation.

You can’t escape the past, including earlier fictional iterations of the Patty Hearst saga.

One nice touch. Laura dispatches the mass murderer with the seeming efficiency of a trained killer. It turns out she was mimicking the futile gesture of a hostage from a past escapade. Also, we learn that she was at one time a piano prodigy, show more so getting a knife through her hand is a way of cutting the apron strings from her long dead Daddy who forced her to learn the piano when he wasn’t … well I won’t give it away.

I regularly use the website fivebooks.com for reading suggestions. Summer Reading 2019: Thrillers, had recommendations by Anthony Franze, organizer of the International Thriller Awards for 2019, and this was one of them. Got the book from the New Haven Public Library. Jacket blurbs were all by fellow thriller writers. You scratch my back, I guess. Not a diss on fivebooks; just don’t trust thrillers solely blurbed by others in the profession. show less

Favorite Quotes:

He was charming, too. That was the problem. He would charm her. He would make her furious. Then he would charm her back again so that she did not know if he was the snake or she was the snake and he was the handler.

It’s only paranoia if you’re wrong.

He pointed to his ear. “Sorry, can't hear you. One of my testicles is still lodged in my ear canal.”

She worked him like Tyson. The boxer, not the chicken.

My Review:

This is only my second time reading the compelling artistry of Karin Slaughter, and I feel compelled to amass copies of all her previous books. This was one of the most complex tales I’ve read since the last time I delved into her work. The complicated storylines were chilling, taut with tension, show more distressing, maddeningly paced, ingeniously constructed, and each contrived with a dark underbelly that was heinous and horrifying. I cannot recall many books where I so thoroughly despised most of the characters; the vast majority of these were vile sociopaths who couldn’t seem to talk without lying. There were many complicated layers to this highly textured and cringe-worthy tale yet I didn’t begrudge the effort required to ferret through the quagmire and was quite awed by the end result. show less

This edge-of-your-seat thriller goes back and forth in time between 1986 and 2018. Stunning revelations punctuate the story from the very beginning, set in August, 2018. Andrea (“Andy”), 31, is living at home with her mother in Belle Isle, Georgia. Andy’s life has pretty much been a failure up to this point, and Andy lacks confidence and quick-wittedness, especially in comparison to her popular and competent mother Laura. Laura Oliver is 55, and works as a speech therapist. As the story opens, the two are at a diner at the mall when a killer comes into the diner and starts shooting. Andy is paralyzed with fear, but her mother takes matters into hand. Afterwards, although her mother is injured, she roughly tells Andy to move out show more that very night. It’s all very bizarre. Andy wonders, who was this woman who could do what she did? Who was her mother?

The shocks are only just beginning for Andy. She left to go stay at her dad’s house, but decided to go back for her bicycle. She discovers Laura in yet another life-or-death situation. This time Andy reluctantly helps, with horrendous consequences. She is forced to flee - her mother gives her money and an address for a storage facility in a small town hours away. Andy realizes she has never known her mother; she has only seen pieces. She knows only that she might be followed, and the level of tension is almost unbearable.

Then the narration switches to 1986 and we find out a bit more about Laura’s life. This doesn’t mean the action slows at all, however. The twists and turns on the road to enlightenment for the reader seem like driving on narrow switchbacks over the mountains. I admit to doing what I rarely do, which is occasionally paging ahead so I could breathe sufficiently to make it through the next segment of the story.

In the end, a final twist caught me totally unawares.

Evaluation: I’ve read a great deal of Karin Slaughter’s books, and this one felt very different than the others. But I’m not complaining! show less

Wow … this story starts out with a huge bang in the first chapter, and rarely lets up throughout the book. Andy’s helpless failure attitude is thrown shrieking to the winds when her mother’s life—her life—is turned upside down by strange men and events beyond her control. Suddenly, Andy wonders if anything her mother ever told her was true. The answers are out there but finding them while she’s on the run will be difficult. Without knowing who she can trust, Andy is on her own with no fallback plan, and no time to form one, for the first time in her life.

Watching Andy’s character development was one of the coolest parts of this story, especially since she’s doing it while being under fire, and has no idea what to do or show more where to go next. This is one of those books that grabs you by the throat (as in, your heart will be in your throat throughout) and won’t let you go until the last page is turned.

The author has done an excellent job at placing tantalizing clues throughout the narrative. I found myself looking for them, piecing them together, and trying to predict what the outcome would be. Spoiler alert: I failed. This puzzle was too complex and multi-layered to even come close until I was three-quarters of the way through, following and swallowing hook after excellent hook.

(As an aside, this story is now a limited run series on Netflix; they did a good job, but as usual, the screen adaptation took liberties with the narrative that diverged in a big way. While at the end of the book, both Andy and Laura/Jane are empowered, the Netflix series puts their power into the hands of a man, and not a nice guy, at that. My suggestion? Read the book first, then watch the series.)

If you love a great, thrilling read, this book is definitely for you. Highly recommended. show less

Es un hecho, soy fan de Karin Slaughter, libro que leo, libro que me gusta.

En esta ocasión Slaughter nos introduce a un thriller narrado en dos tiempos, con un ritmo que no da tregua, un argumento que si bien no es nuevo, si lo ha manejado de tal manera que me ha convencido y sorprendido por partes iguales, no era lo que me esperaba, es un thriller trepidante, inteligente y sobre todo muy bueno y entretenido, literal me ha tenido mordiendome las uñas.

En esta época cuando tanto se habla de feminismo y empoderamiento de las mujeres, cuando hay libros que también hablan mucho sobre maltrato, segregación, mujeres sumisas y demás, Slaughter logra vendernos un argumento donde nos retrata a dos mujeres, madre e hija, que son muy show more diferentes entre ellas, pero que también refleja a muchas mujeres de la vida real, una de ellas atrapada en una relación tóxica, maltratada, manipulada, sobajada, ninguneada y la otra empequeñecida, con un sentimiento de fracaso absoluto y que a pesar de su edad es inmadura, insegura e incluso algo depresiva.

Me ha gustado mucho la manera en que Slaughter ha manejado el final de este libro, si bien pareciera que le da un punto final muy abrupto, llega en el epílogo mucha de la explicación que yo necesitaba y me ha dejado con la sensación de que pudiera haber otro libro o bien este sea el inicio de alguna serie. show less