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A FAINT COLD FEAR

Karin Slaughter

Century, £12.99 Rel: September

Reviewed by Bob Cartwright


Sara Linton is a medical examiner in small town Georgia, not the sort of place where a medical examiner is kept over busy. But as those of you who have chanced on Kisscut or Blindsighted can testify the relative paucity of the murder victims around these parts is compensated by their somewhat gruesome quality, and the delight with which the author recounts the details.

By those standards A Faint Cold Fear matches the two earlier books. A young student is found in a shallow stream having apparent jumped from a bridge. Cue for very elaborate description of what happens to legs, face and private parts when they impact very suddenly with hard ground, especially when one or two pieces of anatomy are adorned with multiple piercings. Sara is called to the scene of the crime in a rush and has to take heavily-pregnant sister Tessa with her. While Sara tends to the body, Tessa heads for the woods to tend to her bodily needs. It’s a while before Sara, and her ex-husband/current partner, police chief Jeff Tolliver, realize that Tessa is taking a long time to have a pee. A frantic search finds Tessa, variously wounded and just about alive.

The dead student is the son of the college counselor, and a member of the Science faculty. The father is the kind of person you can take an instant dislike to (as Mike Ripley once joked, taking an instant dislike to someone can save a lot of time). The recriminations which fly between mother and father over the death of their son resonate in Sara’s family as her parents and Tessa’s partner blame Sara and Jeff for failing to protect Tessa.

Sara is not convinced that the student is a suicide case. She and Jeff also ponder the possibility that the attack on Tessa is linked to the death of the student. Just to complicate matters further Jeff comes up with evidence linking the student with his ex-colleague Lena, who now works in the College security service, and has taken up with a particularly nasty piece of Southern manhood replete with Nazi tattoos. To complicate matters further still, the girl who discovered the body in the stream is found with her head shot off, another apparent suicide, and a wonderful opportunity for Karin Slaughter to graphically describe a body which has become abruptly headless.

If you can recover sufficiently from the occasional gory bits, Karin Slaughter provides a hugely enjoyable read, and the ending to this one leaves a question mark which, I guess, is where the next one will take off. Hope it’s not too long coming.