This is a good one.

Blindsighted started slow, but with a good rhythm to it that made me want to keep going. I’ve read Karin Slaughter before, and it didn’t disappoint - neither did Blindsighted. It is worth the scene setting in the forefront.

The small county of Grant doesn’t see a lot of murders, but when Sybil Adams is found dying on a toilet of the small diner with a cross carved into her torso, things really start to heat up for the sheriff and the coroner; who will see another victim in short order, and then another.

There are a lot of characters involved, none without some baggage and a few with some secrets. Slaughter does a good job of keeping the story moving quickly while not confusing the reader with the large cast. I was deeply invested in Sarah, the coroner, Lena, the half-cocked deputy and sister of the first victim, Jeffrey, the sheriff who never falters in his duties, but sucks as a husband; or does he? The ancillary members of the book round out this incredibly well-written, layered book. You will find yourself speed-reading at the end to find out whodunnit.

TW: There are some graphic sexual violence scenes.

Five stars for Blindsighted. And while I am looking forward to my next Karin Slaughter read, like any good murder mystery, I need to rest in between - this one will haunt me for a day or two. ( )

(2001) Really good first novel by this author. Sara, a part-time coroner and full-time pediatrician in a small town in Georgia finds a blind university professor raped in a bathroom of the local diner. Unable to save her life, she becomes obsessed with finding the murderer along with her ex-husband and his deputy, Lena, who also is the victim's sister. As they try to make sense of this another girl becomes another victim and the trail leads to a man who was convicted of raping Sara several years ago. Red herring, the perp is actually a local pharmacist. Sara winds up killing Jeb as he is attacking her in her house. He had also abducted Lena and hid her in the attic of his house. Once they know who has done it they are able to find her, but too late to save her from the rape and torture Jeb has inflicted. First of a series.KIRKUS REVIEWSince she doubles as pediatrician and coroner for Georgia's Grant County, Dr. Sara Linton is used to trauma. But she doesn't expect it to follow her when she goes to lunch with her plumber sister Tessa and finds Prof. Sibyl Adams, a blind chemist at the Grant Institute of Technology, dying on a toilet seat in the ladies' room from a frightful series of wounds. Once Sara gets Sibyl Adams on the postmortem table, the ghoulish revelations just keep on coming. And her death is only the beginning. Julia Matthews, a coed who's disappeared from her Grant dorm, rapidly turns into another casualty of the same monstrous assailant, a man whose outrages are clearly escalating. Though they don't see eye to eye on very much at all, Sara and her ex-husband, police chief Jeffrey Tolliver, both agree with Sibyl's twin sister Lena Adams, a hotheaded police detective who keeps throwing herself into the case, that the perp isn't Will Harris, the black diner help the town seems to have picked out for the job. But is it really Julia's repellant boyfriend Ryan Gordon, or Jack Allen Wright, the man who raped Sara 12 years ago�a secret she never shared with the man who married her¥or some friend or neighbor too close to think of as a suspect at all?Slaughter's first novel copies Patricia Cornwell's bestselling formula right down to the flaws: gruesome forensics, inventive plotting, strong/imperiled heroine who has problems with down-home male authority, a Perils of Pauline climax. Perfect escapist fare for readers well supplied with Maalox.Pub Date: Sept. 17th, 2001ISBN: 0-688-17457-4Page count: 320ppPublisher: Morrow/HarperCollinsReview Posted Online: May 20th, 2010Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15th, 2001

Solid first novel. The characters were well defined and I particularly liked Sara and her family as well as Jeffrey. The murder was a little graphic, but I can skim through that stuff. The title was spot on, but I won't go into that at the risk of including spoilers. I got this from the library because I loved the Will Trent TV series and this was the first of Slaughter's works. Trent isn't introduced until several books later, but I like to start at the beginning and see origin stories of the various characters. ( )

Typical crime thriller. Deranged psychopath hacking up women... not very creative, but a page tuner. ( )

I side-eye men who use the word 'c*nt' in any context, especially the particular jocularity with which British and Australian men use it. I follow a general rule of thumb: if a man has screamed a particularly gendered word in a woman's face while he raped or murdered her, then it's really not something I want to hear from a man's mouth ever, in jest or otherwise. This book does a really good job of showing precisely why.

There's three alternating perspectives in the book: the local pediatrician/county medical examiner Sara Linton, county police chief Jeffrey Tolliver, and angry cop with a chip on her shoulder Lena Adams.

Right off the bat Lena's identical twin sister is drugged, raped, tortured, and murdered in Grant County's most popular diner and Sara finds her body. And off we go. The crimes are very Patrick Bateman in execution and I guess the gruesomeness was the point.

There was a ridiculous scene where Sara, after doing an autopsy on the murdered woman, guesses she's a lesbian because she'd had an intact hymen at age 33 and had lived with a woman for six years. Which is just so ridiculous I can barely find the words to quantify why. I can only assume it's based on the heterosexual myth that lesbians only engage in non-penetrative oral sex or something? Anyway, it's extremely mega unlikely that a sexually active 33 year year old lesbian would have an intact hymen and I've been thinking about it for days because it was so out of place.

Sara was my favourite because Jeffrey and Lena felt a bit too trope-y to me. Lena is very much the well-trodden archtype of the woman who thinks she'd act differently than the rape victim she has in front of her. Guess what happens to her in the last quarter of the book? If you guessed a prolonged period of being drugged, tortured and raped where she changes her mind, which is graphically described then you are right.

Jeffrey's supposed to be the quintessential "good" man and "good" cop. He's not really either. He used to be married to Sara but cheated on her for the usual Dumb Man™ reasons (ie he did the standard thing where he refused to see Sara as a fully-formed human person but instead as an adjunct of himself and her refusal to give him every part of herself rankled his desire for submission rather than invoking self-reflection). He continued to do Dumb Man™ things throughout the book which was actually quite good characterization but super annoying when his narrative doesn't really add much. I guess we were supposed to feel bad that he's just a Dumb Man™ and thus is only learning how to be sensitive to 50% of the population but I fundamentally do not care about the feelingw of men discovering women are human beings.

It was compellingly written enough that I made it to the end (and not out of spite), but I don't know whether I'd categorize it as 'good' or as something I genuinely liked. There was just something missing for me. I probably would have liked it more if Jeffrey's perspectives had been cut but I suspect Karin Slaughter knew that a straight white male perspective would be needed to market the book in the genre. It also ends abruptly and doesn't do a decent wrap up with such serious material.

Really bad form to go from a rape victim wishing she was dead in the penultimate chapter to Jeffrey forcing his way back into Sara's life, not growing at all from his "stupid mistake" (his words) and telling her he would find her no matter where she goes because he loves her. This was immediately after telling her that the man who raped her twelve years before still kept tabs on her (which she already knew). I think we're supposed to find it a romantic declaration but it comes across as Jeffrey learning literally nothing.

This book was in the building's laundry room, and thus free and that's apparently all it takes sometimes for me to read something. I'll probably return it there because I don't really want to keep it. ( )