I’ve been reading and reviewing crime fiction for years but haven’t opened a Slaughter book in awhile.\u00a0 I remember the last one I read had too much “femjep”–a term mystery writers and readers use to describe the author putting a woman in ridiculously threatening situations.<\/p>\n
Still, I was drawn into her new book Pieces of Her<\/em> because the opening scene was reminiscent of one in Joseph Finder’s terrific High Crimes<\/em> (though not as well done). Andy is a self-pitying young woman who’s failed to make it in New York after five years and she’s gone home to Atlanta.\u00a0 She’s having a mall meal with her tough-but-loving mother when crazy violence erupts, her mother acts way out of character, and the daughter has to flee.<\/p>\n The shocking disruption intrigued me despite very confusing choreography, but the daughter’s reactions were annoyingly slow.\u00a0 She’s the kind of character in a movie you keep yelling at: “Don’t open that door!” or “Turn on the lights!” or “Run outside, not upstairs!”\u00a0 And in fact, her mother plays just that role, because Andy is too feckless to get her ass in gear despite her mother’s urgent commands.<\/p>\n But the whole I-just-saw-my-mother-do-crazy-shit motif really hooked me, even though the writing in the book can feel surprisingly amateurish. Here are some gems:<\/p>\n Her brain felt like it was being squished onto the point of a juice grinder.<\/p>\n The last few days had been like tiptoeing around the sharp end of a needle.<\/p>\n Andy’s head was reeling as she tried to process it in her mind’s eye.<\/p>\n Suddenly all of Andy’s nerves went collectively insane.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The editor in me started noting problems that went beyond Slaughter’s prose, mistakes that the author shouldn’t have made, mistakes a copy editor should have caught.\u00a0 Both could have found the answers on Google, used wisely.<\/p>\n Churchill experts, for instance, will tell you that Churchill never said\u00a0<\/a>“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”\u00a0 George Santayana, however, did<\/em> say “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”\u00a0 And Samuel Beckett is not best known as the author of “Irish avant-garde poetry” but as a playwright (Waiting for Godot<\/em>) and a novelist. Goofs like those in any kind of fiction throw me out of the story as much as iffy phrasing.\u00a0 I start wondering how careful the author was in gathering her facts, and what other mistakes might lie ahead.\u00a0 Here, the hot mess of errors and odd images almost kept me reading out of morbid curiosity–but the story got so convoluted and\u00a0 repetitious that I finally gave up midway.<\/p>\n Lev Raphael is the author of twenty-five books in genres from memoir to mystery.\u00a0 His latest book is the suspense novel Assault With a Deadly Lie<\/a>.\u00a0 He teaches creative writing online at writewithoutborders.com<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been reading and reviewing crime fiction for years but haven’t opened a Slaughter book in awhile.\u00a0 I remember the last one I read had too much “femjep”–a term mystery writers and readers use to describe the author putting a woman in ridiculously threatening situations. Still, I was drawn into her new book Pieces of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[369,875,148,408,219,314,1538,1259,1526,1536,1527,578,1528,1529,510,122,1524,976,501,410,1412,1219],"class_list":["post-4048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thrillers","tag-assault-with-a-deadly-lie","tag-book-review","tag-book-reviewing","tag-churchill","tag-crime-fiction","tag-femjep","tag-george-santayana","tag-http-writewithoutborders-com","tag-karin-slaughter","tag-novels-of-suspense","tag-pieces-of-her","tag-reading-mysteries","tag-reading-suspense","tag-reading-thrillers","tag-reviewing","tag-suspense","tag-suspense-novel","tag-thriller","tag-thrillers","tag-winston-churchill","tag-writewithoutborders","tag-writewithoutborders-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4048"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5982,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4048\/revisions\/5982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/span><\/p>\n