WE ARE ALL GUILTY HERE, by Karin Slaughter - Book Review (Thriller)

⭐⭐⭐⭐ ¼ (Goodreads: 4.2)

GENRE: Contemporary Fiction

PART OF A SERIES? Yes (#1 in the incomplete ‘North Falls’ Series)

WORTH READING? Yes

SUMMARY:

When two teenage girls vanish on fireworks night, a close-knit town is thrown into turmoil. Officer Emmy Clifton is pulled into a case that is not only professional but heartbreakingly personal, and the search for the girls exposes secrets the town would rather keep buried. The investigation draws in Jude Archer, a sharp and enigmatic former FBI agent with a reputation for hunting child predators — and her own reasons for being in North Falls that Emmy can't quite read.

In a place built on familiarity and trust, Emmy and Jude must decide who can be believed before more lives are destroyed.

Opening lines: “Madison Dalrymple leaned her shoulder against the giant oak tree and tried not to panic.”

Emmy Clifton takes it as both a professional duty and a deeply personal reckoning to find the young girls who have disappeared under very suspicious circumstances. She was there. The reader really feels her mounting anxiety and regret.

The pace of We Are All Guilty Here was fantastic! Karin Slaughter can always be relied on to hook her readers straight away… and this book moves along at a cracking pace, never really relaxing. This meant that I never wanted to stop reading — my to-do list didn’t stand a chance!

I liked how Karin Slaughter set this book in two different time periods; the first, when the main protagonist (Emmy) was a young and inexperienced cop, and the second around a decade later.

I’ve always liked the way Slaughter uses language, but I think she’s getting better and better at saying a simple thing (e.g. in this case, a person falling) in an unusual way… “Then she felt a great cleaving behind her; an iceberg breaking off, a mighty limb splitting from a tree.”

I enjoyed this compelling launch to the new North Falls series. It was dark and gripping and well worth reading. I eagerly await the next book!

Click here if you’d like to purchase We Are All Guilty Here from Amazon 

Click here if you’d like to start with the first in the Will Trent series, Triptych   

Click here if you’d like to purchase #2 in the Will Trent series, Fractured 

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