Monday With Kaye: "Pretty Girls" by Karin Slaughter (Reviewed by Kaye George)

Another Monday as we roll on through June means Kaye George is back with another reading suggestion. This is also release day for Kaye’s new book, DEATH ON THE TREK which is the second book in her People of the Wind series. You should check it out. If an awesome cover truly sells books, this one should sell like crazy!

Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter

Slaughter’s first psychological thriller, her fifteenth novel, starts out with seemingly unrelated chapters about seemingly unrelated people. This turns out to be a beautiful construction that depicts a shattered Atlanta family. Twenty-four years ago, Julia Carroll disappeared from the University of Georgia campus. She’s never been found and her remaining family doesn’t know if she’s dead or alive.

The tragedy not only split up her parents, Sam and Helen, the aftermath drove a wedge between her sisters, Lydia and Claire, that has lasted eighteen years. Claire married the incredibly successful millionaire, Paul Scott, lives a perfect life, at least to an outside observer. While Lydia, having struggled for years with drug and other legal problems, is climbing out of the messes she’s created and is finding meaning through her daughter, Dee, struggling to send her to a private school she can’t afford.

Now another young, pretty, blonde has gone missing. This one only sixteen, but there are similarities between her and Julia and the media attention is dredging up the old despair and ripping open the wounds of all of them, except Sam, who has already committed suicide. This new disaster could either draw the family back together, or tear them even further apart.

This book is dark, intense, and quite graphic. It will keep you on the edge of your seat with your shoulders tensed for the next blow, then the next, then the next. I stayed up way too late finishing it!




Reviewed by Kaye George, author of “Death in the Time of Ice,” for Suspense Magazine