Tuesday , April 23 2024
So good I stayed in bed on a vacation day ...

Book Review: ‘Unseen’ by Karin Slaughter

Karin Slaughter has done it again, written another thriller, titled Unseen, which is so good I read it all in chunks in three days, choosing the first morning I started it to stay in bed reading it until page 150 when I decided I needed to get up and moving (it was a vacation day.)

When I interviewed Karin before, a few years ago, here I asked about the level of violence in her books and she answered that and other questions, as she also  does here on her Frequently Asked Questions page.

Her thought-provoking response regarding violence is why is she as a woman expected to have less violence than male authors, especially women are more often the victims of violence then men? This book too has quite a bit of violence but it’s appropriate for the story.

This book has some good plot twists, some of which I saw coming, some of which I had not predicted. It has masterful pacing as the reader learns about two stories which we readers know connect and overlap somehow but we are not quite sure how.

As it begins two police officers, Lena and Jared, are attacked in their home and Lena fights back but Jared is badly hurt. Jared’s stepmother, Sara, goes to the hospital where she does major hating on Lena because she holds Lena responsible for Sara’s husband being murdered previously.

Meanwhile, Will Trent, a Georgia Bureau of Investigation Agent, is posing as a scary ex-con. He is Sara’s boyfriend but he can’t tell her what he knows about the attack on Jared and Lena – including that Will himself was also in that house during the attack – without blowing his cover.

Will he opt to lose the only love of his life? Why did Lena and Jared get attacked? These and other questions are answered.

If you’re like me you may get so much into the book at times that you forget to fully breathe until the book ends.

Check out this and the other books in Karin’s series and you can thank me later.

About Scott Butki

Scott Butki was a newspaper reporter for more than 10 years before making a career change into education... then into special education. He has been working in mental health for the last ten years. He lives in Austin. He reads at least 50 books a year and has about 15 author interviews each year and, yes, unlike tv hosts he actually reads each one. He is an in-house media critic, a recovering Tetris addict and a proud uncle. He has written articles on practically all topics from zoos to apples and almost everything in between.

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