Book Review: Fractured

Spoilers!

One of the most difficult parts of reading fiction (or ya know, paying attention to real life) is knowing people exist who’ve experienced the worst of human behavior — physical and/or verbal abuse, torture, negligence, humiliation, and most viscerally offensive, rape — and yet, they must go on. They are not dead. Karin Slaughter knows how to pull on such threads until she’s dragging my heart along at a suspenseful breakneck speed, and when we reach our destination, I’m not sure I want my heart back. Ignorance is bliss, and all that. But she makes us observe and sit with it. That’s the mark of a fearless writer, who also implicitly trusts her audience.

In her 2008 book, Fractured, Slaughter brings us back to the heartbreaking world of Will Trent, Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent, who is functionally illiterate, but needs to catch a murderer and/or kidnapper. A familiar theme throughout the book, starting with Will, is we all have childhoods marred by a tragedy (or tragedies) of a kind, just varying by degree. Will grew up as a ward of the state. As did his fiancée, Angie (who doesn’t deserve Will!). Paul, the father of the kidnapped 17-year-old Emma, was in those same situations with Will. Faith, an Atlanta Police Department Homicide Detective, who was impregnated by an abusive teenager when she was 14, struggles with that fact, stunting her adult relationships. And Abigail, Emma’s mother, struggles with her mother because of that inexplicable thing that comes between mothers and daughters. That same thing comes between Abigail and Emma, as Emma grows older and befriends Kayla, a troublemaker. Finally, Warren, the man who broke into Abigail and Paul’s house to abduct Emma, but in the process brutally killed his co-conspirator, Kayla, and then Adam, Emma’s boyfriend, who tried to intervene, is like Will in two respects: a.) functionally illiterate, and b.) also grew up as a ward of the state. (I still don’t see how you could make it to the GBI functionally illiterate!) So, that theme is the current pulsing through Slaughter’s book, but obviously, the point is, we all still have choices. Warren made his, and Will made his.

Albeit, Warren is also a victim of a kind, to Evan Bernard, who groomed Warren from an early age on the basis of Warren never having a father figure and because Bernard’s a reading coach, who could help Warren with his illiteracy. He then compelled Warren, along with Kayla, who he was raping (she’s underage and his student, after all), to help him kidnap Emma and ransom the rich Abigail and Paul out of $1 million, ironically enough, to pay for Bernard’s civil lawsuits against a previous school for terminating him for sleeping with students! Sicko. In other words, Bernard’s the mastermind, but it all goes wrong when Warren snaps on Kayla and then kills Adam. I didn’t guess Warren would factor in — I never imagined this crime was a two-man operation — but I did suspect Bernard almost immediately. He was late to the meeting between Will, Faith, and the teachers at Emma and Kayla’s school, a red flag, and plus, I just always suspect teachers in fiction, especially when rape is on the table. I never suspected just how deranged he was, though. I also didn’t realize Kayla would be a co-conspirator because she apparently was just an awful person who everyone detested. Kayla, as a character, received somewhat short shrift there.

I especially liked the dynamic between Will and Faith. Because of his upbringing, and his lone man style, he’s not used to having a partner, and it creates tension between him and Faith, but he’s not being a willful jerk, and certainly, he’s not a casual misogynist like her fellow APD detectives and officers. It didn’t help Will’s case that he’d previously investigated the APD for stealing drug money and ensnaring seven cops in the case, narrowly capturing Faith’s own cop mother in the scheme. Of course, blue back the blue, which isn’t shocking, if still infuriating. What was shocking to me was that Slaughter established Will’s higher character and conduct with that background, and then later, Will is the one who compels Faith to do something outside the bounds of the law — taking evidence from the crime scene outside the chain-of-command. That made no sense to me! I don’t want even my fiction perpetuating the idea that it’s okay to bend the rules if the ends justify it, particularly among cops. (In a similar vein, as a digression, I don’t know why a lot of fiction views journalists as vultures! Tabloid folks are one thing, but actual reporters? Not at all. Grr.)

Slaughter’s book read quickly because I needed answers, and the smart detective work, along with the backstory provided for our main characters, kept the story moving forward a blistering pace. There was never a dull moment. Then, Slaughter hits us with the Epilogue where we must sit with it. Because, thanks to said detective work, Will and Faith rescue Emma, who has been abused, tortured, left in an attic with rats, and repeatedly raped, but she’s alive. Alive. The Epilogue is all about how Abigail, Paul, and Emma are navigating the first few months of continuing on. I just can’t imagine. Not a bit.

I love reading Slaughter because she never pulls her punches, her characters have unmistakable flaws and yet, are still worth rooting for, and she brings you as deep into the abyss as she can, before pulling you back up for breath by the final page. She’s a master of mystery and suspense.