Broken »

Karin Slaughter is the New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including Beyond Reach and A Faint Cold Fear, which was named an International Book of the Month Club selection; 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, which Delacorte Press will publish in 2010.

 
Karin Slaughter’s internationally bestselling novels are as notable for their vivid portraits of lives shadowed by loss and heartbreak as they are for their dramatic criminal investigations. Her latest offering features the return of her most compelling characters and introduces memorable new ones in a tale of corruption, murder, and confrontation that will leave more than one life . . . 
 
When Special Agent Will Trent arrives in Grant County, he finds a police department determined to protect its own and far too many unanswered questions about a prisoner’s death. He doesn’t understand why Officer Lena Adams is hiding secrets from him. He doesn’t understand her role in the death of Grant County’s popular police chief. He doesn’t understand why that man’s widow, Dr. Sara Linton, needs him now more than ever to help her crack this case.

While the police force investigates the murder of a young woman pulled from a frigid lake, Trent investigates the police force, putting pressure on Adams just when she’s already about to crack. Caught between two complicated and determined women, trying to understand Linton’s passionate distrust of Adams, the facts surrounding Chief Tolliver’s death, and the complexities of this insular town, Trent will unleash a case filled with explosive secrets—and encounter a thin blue line that could be murderous if crossed.

Spellbinding and keenly paced, Broken is Karin Slaughter at her best. Here is an unforgettable story of raw emotions, dangerous assumptions, the deadly and layered game of betrayal, and a man’s determination to expose the most painful of human truths—no matter how deeply they’re hidden . . . or how devastating.

Publishers Weekly

Natalie Ross brings an earnest performance to her reading of Slaughter’s latest thriller, a sequel to 2009’s Undone, a complex tale of murder and lies. Dr. Sara Linton reluctantly returns to Grant County, Ga., where her chief of police husband was killed, to spend Thanksgiving with her family. The last thing she wants is to become involved in the apparent murder of a young college student, but with the suicide of the prime suspect, the simple-minded Tommy Braham, Sara is soon deep into an investigation that isn’t only about murder, but coverups and corruption in the police department as well. With the help of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s special agent Will Trent, Sara discovers a tangled web of deception and danger. Slaughter has built an superbly plotted story where nothing is as simple as it appears. Ross delivers the prose smoothly, nicely differentiating between the characters. Some decisions in the sound editing tend to be more distracting to the story than effective, but these are few and easily dismissed. A Delacorte hardcover (Reviews, May 24). (July)