Faithless by Karin Slaughter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Faithless is the penultimate book in Karin Slaughter’s Grant County series. When I began this series, I really wanted to like it, but each successive installment keeps hitting me as meh. Slaughter is a superb writer–her plotting, pacing, scene construction and word choice are all very good. She is a master at building suspense. I think I’ve finally identifies the problem I have with the stories–I don’t like the characters. All of them are flawed, which seems to be the trend these days, and I’m a romantic at heart, so that rubs me the wrong way. But they also make poor decisions vis a vis their work–decisions that would likely get one severely reprimanded, if not fired, had they occurred in real life. Naturally, the results such decisions are responsible for many of Slaughter’s plot twists, and her characters don’t seem to learn from their mistakes. I just can’t gin up much sympathy for people like that.
In Faithless, protagonists Police Chief Jeffery Tolliver and county coroner Dr. Sara Linton discover the body of a young woman who was entombed alive in a box with an air pipe attached, only to be killed later by cyanide poured down the pipe. The investigation leads to a rural religious cult. However, as much or more of the action in the books come from the characters personal demons–Jeffery and Sara’s on-again, off-again relationship, Detective Lena Adams abusive relationship and Sara’s sister’s involvement with the cult. I figured out the mystery pretty early on, so most of my reading was done just to prove I was right while shaking my head at the characters’ ill-considered actions.
I’ll read the last book in the series just to finish what I’ve started, but I don’t hold out great hope. Of course,these problems might be why the author chose to end the series after just six entries.
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