Review - Criminal by Karin Slaughter

Published July 5th 2012 by Century

448 pages

Paperback

Lucy, who's life has fallen apart for the love of the needle. As expected her love demands that she walks the streets to avoid the bone breaking experience of withdrawal. The same also true for Jane, Kitty and Mary. 

 Their pimp who goes by the loveable name "juice" is both their protector and abuser. He's supposed to be tough mother-fucker but the only face I could picture was "Shorty" from the first Scary Movie : 

As their stories take a turn for the worst we are dragged back in time to the beginning of Amanda and Evelyn.  What was interesting here was the obvious personality flip. Evelyn being the wild child with Amanda just meekly tagging along. The book give a great insight into the life of the working woman in the 1970's. No respect, no compassion and no recognition. Nothing more than a troublesome "slit".

Evelyn and Amanda work together to bring down the criminal committing these depraved crimes against vulnerable women. In the process we see how their life long friendship came into being and how they both knew more of Will's past than they ever cared to admit. 

The chapters with Evelyn and Amanda really drove the story forward but the interrupting chapters with Sarah and Will just slowed the pace too much for my taste. I'm just getting tired of paragraphs full of meaningful glances between them. It's just too repetitive and hopefully it ends with this book.  I'm also hoping that one of my favourite characters, Angie will play a larger part in the next book. However she is present in this novel, skulking in the shadows as usual.

The latter half of the book is engaging and on par with her better novels but on the whole the pace was just too slow and it made getting through it a bit of a chore.

Rating: