Pieces of Her
by Karin Slaughter
Thanks so much to William Morrow Books for these copies. Slaughter is one of my favorite authors so I may or may not have squealed when I received this book in the mail!
See what Jessica and I thought of this compulsive thriller and also read a Q&A with author below our reviews!
Publisher: William Morrow Books
Publish Date: August 21, 2018
Hardcover
480 Pages
Standalone
Genres: Thriller, Suspense
What if the person you thought you knew best turns out to be someone you never knew at all . . . ?Andrea Cooper knows everything about her mother, Laura. She knows she’s spent her whole life in the small beachside town of Belle Isle; she knows she’s never wanted anything more than to live a quiet life as a pillar of the community; she knows she’s never kept a secret in her life. Because we all know our mothers, don’t we?
But all that changes when a trip to the mall explodes into violence and Andrea suddenly sees a completely different side to Laura. Because it turns out that before Laura was Laura, she was someone completely different. For nearly thirty years she’s been hiding from her previous identity, lying low in the hope that no one would ever find her. But now she’s been exposed, and nothing will ever be the same again.
The police want answers and Laura’s innocence is on the line, but she won’t speak to anyone, including her own daughter. Andrea is on a desperate journey following the breadcrumb trail of her mother’s past. And if she can’t uncover the secrets hidden there, there may be no future for either one of them. . . .
Slaughter is one of my favorite authors. Why, you ask? Well, let me tell you. Her writing is utterly addicting!! In Pretty Girls she really shows her grit and I loved every minute of it - there was even some chatter that she may have gone too far in one of her scenes, but not for me! In The Good Daughter, she was equally compulsive but I had so many more feelings - the last 150 pages had me in tears. While those two books are her most popular these days and are some what different, they both had that gritty feel you like to dig your teeth into.
With Pieces of Her, Slaughter opens up with a BANG! I went through 200+ pages in no time and was glued to this story. The writing is addicting and she knows just how to get under your skin, wear you like a suit and then give you back after you've turned that last page.
We follow two timelines - present day in Andy's story as she tries to figure out who her mother really is and back to the 1980s where we get to see into Laura's past. Now, I'll be honest, the beginning of the second part, when we first went back to 1986 confused me for a moment. When you read this book you'll know why and then you get that moment where *light bulb* and you start to see the direction the book is going. I'll be honest, I had more fun with the present day timeline that the past - but that's just my preference.
I will say that I felt the story slowed down through the last quarter of the book. I usually like my pacing to ramp up rather than slow down. However, I will say that the way Slaughter brings everything together is nothing short of genius... and this is why she'll forever be one of my favorites.
#SlaughterSquad - I suggest going into this one a little open minded and realize it's not going to be quite as gritty as Pretty Girls or as emotional as The Good Daughter. Still brilliantly written, addicting with a touch of cult and a lot of WHO IS SHE?! You really don't ever know everything about someone. But what happens when the mother who raised you turns out to be completely different than anything you ever knew?
Get in. Get Slaughtered
★★★★
Jessica's Review:
So last year was my introduction to Karin Slaughter when the #CJSReads trio read THE GOOD DAUGHTER and I fell in love with her writing. She has a way of writing that just immediately sucks you in and you don't even realize you've read 200 pages already (something that Chandra and I had in common with this one!).
We have the dual timelines in this one and we go from present day and then flashback to the 1980's. In the present, we follow Andrea (Andy). She has always been close with her mother but when faced with a desperate situation, she realizes how little she really know about her mother's life. There are secrets galore and Andrea finds herself trying to dig through Laura's past. It's really hard to talk much about the plot without giving anything exciting away!
This one had a different feel to it than THE GOOD DAUGHTER did, I can't quite decide what it specifically is though. I did enjoy the present day perspective and story better than the 1980's flashbacks (to Laura's life). There was more action and suspense with Andrea's story. I think because of this, I connected more with Andrea than with Laura.
This was another page-turner with a great pacing for the first half of the book. I did feel like it slowed down a little bit towards the middle, but otherwise it's real binge-worthy read! If you're a fan of Karin Slaughter, then this is a no-brainer.
I give this 4/5 stars
Q&A
What kind of research
do you do for a book, and how much do you research before you start writing?
I
research all the sex myself. The rest--it depends on what the story needs. For
PIECES OF HER, there wasn’t a hell of a lot of questions for the experts. After
doing this for a long time, I have a lot of knowledge of things the police do,
or how investigations work, or clues or things like that that are in my head
just from working on previous novels and talking to cops and forensics folks
and that sort of thing. With the GOOD DAUGHTER, that opening—I talked to
Georgian Bureau Investigation Agents who were on scene at school shootings.
Even though it wasn’t told from a cop’s point of view, I wanted to know what
the cops were thinking and how they would respond. I actually watched a GBI drill with all the
agents from the state, where they took over an abandoned school and simulated
an active shooter incident. Each agent had to go through and find the bad guy.
Having witnessed the drills, I was pretty conversant with what the situation
felt like, but there’s always stuff that surprise me that people who are on the
other side of law enforcement never think about, like the fact that—I talk
about this in the GOOD DAUGHTER—everybody shows up. They could be ATF, they
could be training canines for the DEA, they all show up. They’re all there to
help. And no one says where’s the jurisdiction, where’s the money coming from,
or whatever. It’s just “tell us what to
do” when a large-scale tragedy happens. I love writing about those “inside
baseball” sorts of details. With PIECES OF HER, I talk about how even if you’re
in Witness Protection, you can still go to prison. And just from a practical
standpoint, Andy’s driving was something that I had to be very careful
about. Andy’s navigating of half the
country difficult for me because I suck at directions. I’m the kind of person
who’s told to get on a train—I was in Rotterdam, told to get on a train to
Antwerp, and I ended up in Germany. So, I’m not very good with directions at
all. I just had to knuckle down with all that and think about how many days it
would take and what it would feel like. Because I’ve been on trips like that
(someone else was navigating), and I wanted to describe the sensations in a way
that made sense. I was also mindful of my European readers, and how compact
some of the countries are as compared to America. Taking a detail, like you
could put all of England in Lake Michigan and it wouldn’t touch the sides, that
kind of puts it in scale for people. But just the grueling hours and hours of
being trapping in a car, and what that would look like on the interstate, I
know intimately from long road trips. I wanted to capture that with Andy.
How do you select the
names of your characters?
I
like to look at names on my Facebook page. Queller, actually…. I watch Super Girl, and one of the producers on
that show, her last name is Queller, and I was like, oh that’s a good name. The
thing about names is, I really have to think about them, because if it’s an
unusual name, or if it’s a memorable name, that’s generally my way of telling
the reader, “Pay attention to this character.” Like, Queller is an interesting
name, so I think that goes with the character and the family I’m talking about.
Oliver’s not an unusual name. I’m very deliberate with that, and I feel like
it’s important visually and mentally to help keep the reader anchored in the
story. If everyone was named Smith or
Jones, it would be really hard to follow.
But I just got a query from my Danish translator, because Mike’s fake
yard service is Knepper’s Knippers, and Knepper in Danish is a really nasty word
(fucker). So we had to change it just for the Danish.
Who
do you consider your literary heroes? Why?
Flannery
O’Connor, Margaret Mitchell, Harper Lee. I have great respect for some
contemporary non-southern writers. Lee Child is pretty amazing. He’s basically
writing the same story—Reacher shows up in some strange place, kicks butt,
makes things right--but each time it’s interesting. Each time he manages to say
something new. There’s a formula, and sometimes people mean that in a negative
way, but Lee knows what he’s doing, and to be able to consistently deliver a
good story is laudable.
If
you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?
There’s
a book I read when I was a kid, it’s science fiction, called the Forever Formula. It’s about being able
to transfer consciousness of older people into younger people. Like, an
invasion of the body snatchers sort of thing. This was not a particularly
clever or exciting story, but, if you read sci-fi when you’re a kid, it opens
you up to all kinds of reading when you’re an adult. And I think every story,
whether it’s A Tale of Two Cities or Gone With the Wind or Beowulf, there’s some element of
fantasy. You’re making stuff up. Even if you’re writing about something real
like Atlanta, my Atlanta is going to be very different than someone else’s. We
bring our experiences and our imagination to the work. On the surface I’m
writing about the same thing Michael Connelly writes. I’m writing about murder
and cops, and ordinary people in horrible situations. But it’s our experience
and our attention to what details we point out that make the story uniquely
ours. So I think reading something like the Forever Formula—and to my memory
that was my first time reading science fiction—I had no idea what genre I was
reading but I loved it. I just picked it up because the cover had a brain on
it. And I’m sure if I read it now I might think, God I was really stupid to love this book. But it did have a big
influence on me, because it opened my mind to possibilities. But also, at an
older age, Flannery O’Connor really changed my life. I grew up in a town where
I was constantly being told to be more lady-like, to not horse around, to not
let guys know if I was smarter than them. You know, to sit with my knees
together and my back straight. The stories I was interested in weren’t stories
a young lady should be interested in. And then I read Flannery O’Connor, and
learned about her life as a writer, and how renowned and celebrated she was
around the world for writing about these things, and I thought, “You lying
F***rs!” She grew up in a small Southern town, and she’s writing about
murderers and crime, and she’s being rewarded for it!
How did publishing
your first book change your process of writing?
The
biggest stress you have when you’re not published is that you’re not published.
By my second book, I knew they were going to publish at least two. So that
particular stress was taken off. But also, my first book was very successful—I
was really fortunate—and there was a lot of unanticipated stress that came with
success. I remember at the time a friend of mine gave me this interview with
Dorothy Allison. She said the worst thing that can happen to a writer is to get
published. And I think what she meant was, you realize it’s a business, and not
many people want to accept that. They want to be zillionaires, but they think
that once they write the book, it’s solely the publisher’s job to make the book
successful. It’s never been that way in
the history of publishing. I mean, Dickens toured. He performed his work for
crowds. So did Poe. So did most every author you still read
today. I think that to be successful is
a great thing but it presents new challenges. For me, I was very lucky, because
my publisher, Morrow, was bought by HarperCollins, and I’d written my first
book, but they postponed my publication. So, I started to write my second book
before the first book was out there. And that was a great gift, because I
didn’t have that added stress. I mean I still had to work on the second book
and edit it and all that stuff, but I had more confidence because I still felt
like I was in that unpublished cave. Confidence is a tricky and elusive thing,
but with writing, the more you write, the more confidence you feel about
certain elements. With PIECES OF HER,
there’s a sense of confidence that comes from writing so many books—"I
know how to do this, I know how the story and plotting should work, I am
confident in the structure so I can take risk in the narrative.” And also
unfortunately I’m getting older. A woman in her thirties looks at life
differently than a woman who’s not in her thirties anymore. I remember, with my
third book, I did an event at the Washington
Post with Mary Higgins Clark, and there were three people in my line to get
their books sign, and two were there because they thought it was the bathroom,
and Mary had 600 people in her line. She was so sweet, she bought one of my
books. I was leaving after ten minutes, totally humiliated, and Mary pulled out
her Prada bag and her wallet and said, “Let me buy one of your books!” She has
always been such a kind, supportive lady.
I remember once I saw all of her books stacked up, and I said, “Wow, one
day I hope I can write half as many.” And Mary said, “There’s a down side. You
have to get older to do it.” And now I get what she meant, and it sucks.
What is your writing
Kryptonite?
My
bladder. But also, I guess it’s good because it makes me get up after sitting
for so long. I’m pretty focused when I write. I really need time to think about
plot and character or I’m not a very efficient writer. Normally I write very
quickly, because I give a lot of thought to what I’m going to write, so by the
time I sit down it’s really plotted out, and I feel very sure about where I’m
going and what I want to do. And when I don’t have that sense of surety, then I
can overwrite or make it boring, or it just doesn’t work, and I have to do it
all over again because I’m not going to turn in crap. So not taking time is the
kryptonite.
What does literary
success look like to you?
To
me, it means I get to write the stories I want to write. I’ve never been
censored, my editor Kate Elton has always trusted me and believed in what I was
doing. I think sometimes editors might publish a book they’re not actually
excited about, and Kate is always excited about all kinds of books, whether
it’s rereading Daphne du Maurier, or reading my stuff, or Eleanor Oliphant, or whatever. She loves popular fiction. And I
think sometimes people don’t embrace what’s popular because they want people to
think they’re smart so they say, “I only read Proust and listen to NPR,” which
is bullshit because your brain would shrivel if that’s all you did. So success
to me is basically, I get to write exactly what I want to write, and that’s
given me the confidence to write things like PIECES OF HER, because it’s a
little different, but I’ve always known that my publishers will support my
choices. Not all writers can say that.
