The Good Daughter

The Good Daughter by Karin Slaughter
HarperCollins: 8/8/17
hardcover; 528 pages
ISBN-13: 9780062430243

The Good Daughter by Karin Slaughter is an outstanding, intense, exemplary, very highly recommended thriller. It will grab your attention from the first page, become an obsession, and consume every free second while wringing every emotion out of you. Seriously - this novel is excellent.

The prologue opens twenty-eight years ago. After their Pikeville, GA, home had been burned down by someone who didn't like their father, attorney Rusty Quinn, the family moved into an old farm house. Sisters Charlotte (Charlie) and Samantha (Sam) Quinn were in the kitchen with their mother, Gamma, when Zach Culpepper and an accomplice broke into their home, looking for their father. Rusty wasn't there so the men terrorized his family, murdering Gamma, and then traumatize and harm the two sisters, leaving both physically and psychologically damaged.

Charlie is the good daughter. She is a lawyer, like her father, and still living in Pikeville. She is currently separated from her husband, ADA Ben Bernard, when she makes a poor life choice. This results in her inadvertently being on the scene and a witness to a horrible crime and tragedy that takes place in the local middle school.  The crime horrifies the whole town and causes Charlie to flashback to the trauma from her childhood. Naturally, Rusty, who believes everyone deserves an advocate, will take on the defense.

The Good Daughter is a wonderfully complex multilayered novel. There is heart-wrenching violence, conflicted emotions and struggles alongside humorous and heart-breaking scenes. The writing is, as expected from Slaughter, excellent - sophisticated, detailed, and intricate. The plot is perfectly presented, with the present day contrasted with past events as more information slowly comes to light. The setting, the character development, the twists... are all perfectly executed. It held my rapt attention from beginning, tossed me around through oh-so-many new developments, had me a messy-crying mess at one point, and finally left me speechless and breathless at the end.

How many ways can I extol Slaughter for The Good Daughter? This is a must-read for all fans of thrillers/crime novels. Really, read it. It is an extremely rare you-will-miss-your-flight-if-you-are-reading-it-while-in-an-airport novel. Read it first, then take the flight. You will thank me for very highly recommending it and then I predict you will look at Slaughter's other novels.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book courtesy of HarperCollins for TLC Book Tours. 

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