Recommended Reading: Aatia's Forever Favorites
Backlist books need love too! For this series, each bookseller is shouting out a few backlist titles (as opposed to recent frontlist books) that you should put at the top of your TBR. This week ‘s recommendations come from Aatia, who is deep into a years-long love affair with mysteries and thrillers.
I first started reading Karin Slaughter’s books because I was looking to break up the monotony of the mostly British contemporary thrillers I had cycled through for years. Searching for something grim and dark, I wanted the kind of book to make Gillian Flynn go ‘damn, this is some twisted stuff.’ Slaughter is a machine; in her 20-year career she has published 29 books, including multiple series. I find her standalone novels most compelling. Here are the ones I’ve read in the order that I read them.
The Good Daughter by Karin Slaughter
Woah, what an entry point! The Good Daughter begins at the conclusion of a long and fraught murder trial. The Quinn family, an upstanding country lawyer in the style of Atticus Finch, a promising scientist and their two teen daughters are brutally attacked in their homes in rural Georgia. Only one Quinn woman survives, and twenty-eight years later another shocking tragedy brings the horrors of that night flooding back. This book has one of the most compelling, heart-pounding and suspenseful first chapters I have ever read.
Cop Town by Karin Slaughter
Cop Town transports you to 1970’s Atlanta, where the first class of women officers are hitting the city’s streets, and just in time, as the Atlanta PD have their hands full hunting a serial killer. The book’s protagonists are two new officers. One, a beautiful woman from a good family, no one can figure out why she joined the force, and the other is a cop’s daughter who knows brutality and violence all-too-well. Slaughter’s portrayal is gritty, violent and she deftly writes about social issues here. The world of Cop Town completely captivated me and it reads like an HBO drama.
Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter
This is unequivocally, the grittiest of Slaughter’s books and a crowd favorite. Lydia and Claire, have been torn apart by the death of their sister years earlier. As adults they live in very different circumstances. When Claire’s husband is killed in a robbery, the women are forced back into one another’s lives and questions about the past resurface. The family dynamics that emerge from Slaughter’s writing are fascinating to read. Her characters are her strength! Plus, the peril and fear of the end scene have stayed with me for years and the crime at the heart of this book is very very dark.
Pieces of Her by Karin Slaughter
I read Pieces of Her in my senior year of college. A slew of literary and genre fiction had been published about cults (THE GIRLS by Emma Cline comes to mind) and they had all gripped me. When authors write group dynamics and human behavior with such attention to detail, I swoon. This book swept me up in its batshit-craziness. On a quiet Saturday in Belle Isle, Andrea and her mother Laura are caught in a mass shooting and when Laura springs into action to protect her daughter, Andrea starts to question the woman’s past and her identity. To answer these questions, readers are thrown thirty years back into the past. To her credit, Slaughter sets her plot twists up well, but I had no clue where this one was going, and I loved it!
As of 2021, Netflix is adapting Pieces of Her into a series starring Toni Collette (Hereditary, United States of Tara).
