I'm running out of things to say about Karin Slaughter's books in these reviews. I've written so many in the past month and a half, but I generally feel the same way. Her writing style is great and so easy to get into. Her stories are fascinating. I'm always drawn in and finish her books in just a day or two because I'm so utterly engrossed.

The main weak point for me is the characters. Her characters are generally unlikable, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. In many cases I think it's worked in her favor and been my favorite part of the book. But in this book, the mystery centers around Faith Mitchell, partner to main character Will Trent, and her mother's kidnapping. I find Faith to be quite annoying whenever she has a large role (except Fractured, which was her first appearance). Since the whole mystery was about Faith's family, it kind of grated on me. I didn't think this book was bad, but I don't like/care about most of her main characters, so I wasn't super fond of the mystery centering entirely around them.

My least favorite of the series so far, but I still read this book in a day and still enjoyed it. Definitely worth it if you're reading the whole series, though.

My usual Karin Slaughter spiel (check out my earlier reviews for this series if you want more in depth thoughts): the main characters are irritating, her writing is great, the stories are fantastic, I'm engrossed from page one and usually finish these books in about a day. Highly recommend if you like cop thrillers. They're the best I've read.

Two critiques for this one. First, and I think this has been a problem through all of her books but was most apparent here, it feels like there are some factual inconsistencies from book to book. I'm noticing them because of how quickly I'm reading through this series, but they're not usually anything important. I also can't really bring up many examples because they're small things that I'm too lazy to check, but in this book I noticed them more. There are certain facts about Will Trent's past that don't line up (some aren't meant to for reasons explained in the story, but there are other details). Not an example from this book, but once a character said they hadn't consumed alcohol in over a year when they'd had alcohol during the previous book that happened less than a year ago. I only include that because it's the one thing I'm actually one hundred percent certain on. But there were a few dozen more details throughout the books that I was pretty sure were inconsistent. Not enough that it lessened my experience much, but it did bug me.

The second point was her historical fiction scenes. I read Cop Town a while back and gave it three stars, didn't particularly enjoy it, and the historical fiction scenes in this book read exactly like Cop Town. They were set at the same time in the same place and dealt with largely the same issues. It felt like the two were interchangeable. And I just think I don't enjoy historical fiction cop thrillers, at least not the way Slaughter writes them. I was always itching to get back to the present.

But I still really enjoyed this book and it was nice to learn more about Will Trent's history.

My usual Karin Slaughter spiel (check out my earlier reviews for this series if you want more in depth thoughts): the main characters are irritating, her writing is great, the stories are fantastic, I'm engrossed from page one and usually finish these books in about a day. Highly recommend if you like cop thrillers. They're the best I've read.

I really enjoy the character of Lena Adams. And not just her character, but her role within the story. Basically, she sucks. She's not a horrible human being in any interesting ways, she just kind of sucks. She's a sloppy cop and can be a little cruel and self absorbed, but all in very normal ways. She's not a villain, just a sucky person. I don't read a lot of thrillers where people are allowed to suck in normal capacities. The dynamic she brings to the story with her conflict with the usual main characters and history with Sara Linton in particular is fantastic. I've loved both Will Trent novels she's been in.

At this point in the series, I'm starting to get a little irritated at the romance between Will and Sara. As a couple they're fine. I like them together, I hope they stick around as a couple. But I don't like the romance drama Slaughter has started writing in. Every book they have a problem of Will not talking to Sara and then Sara not talking back. They both push each other way and worry about their relationship failing until the end where they express their feelings and promise to stay together forever. It's happened a couple times and it's getting annoying.

Great book, all in all. If you read two books out of this series, I highly recommend the two with Lena Adams (Broken and Unseen).

My usual Karin Slaughter spiel (check out my earlier reviews for this series if you want more in depth thoughts): the main characters are irritating, her writing is great, the stories are fantastic, I'm engrossed from page one and usually finish these books in about a day. Highly recommend if you like cop thrillers. They're the best I've read.

I feel like Angie's character has changed between books. She doesn't seem like the same person she was in Triptych, and not because of character development and growth. She just seems like a different character because her role in the story changed. It irritates me a little, but maybe I just interpreted her differently eight books ago. She didn't seem so cartoonishly evil back then.

I still have problems with the way the romance between Sara and Will is written. It's the same drama every book. They spend the entire book stressing about some lack of communication and then have half a conversation at the end that solves it because it was never really a problem to begin with. It's one element I could do without. I'd rather have less drama from them and just focus on the mystery, because there's plenty of drama there to fill an entire book.

But yeah, I love it. I wanted to go to the library today and get the ninth book in the series, but alas it was closed so instead I just wrote a bunch of backlog reviews for her books. I usually give cop thrillers 2-3 stars. 3 stars for a cop thriller is usually a good rating from me. They're forgetting and fun, but not particularly great. I've loved Karin Slaughter's, though. I've literally read ten of her books in just over a month and don't plan on stopping. This whole Will Trent series is fantastic and I've only given one of the books below four stars.

Honestly, the only reasons this book even manages a three star rating is because it's so short it doesn't have a lot of time to irritate me, I don't care about Greg Mortenson so I wasn't the intended audience, and I've greatly enjoyed many of Krakauer's other works so I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. But this was not particularly worthwhile.

Caveat at the beginning, I've never read Three Cups of Tea, I know nothing about Greg Mortenson, and I've only vaguely heard about the Central Asia Institute and their mission building schools. I picked up this book because I'm reading all of Krakauer's works, and most of it has been incredibly interesting even if I had no prior interest in/knowledge of the topic. This proved to be the exception.

It read like Mortenson pissed off Krakauer on some personal level, so Krakauer wanted to write destroy him. Krakauer donated a bunch of money to the organization and I think heard some rumors about sketch goings on, then did research and wrote this to expose Mortenson's lies and corruption.

But honestly, I could summon any of the hatred or disdain Krakauer has for Mortenson. He was throwing around words like evil and corrupt and acting like Mortenson was manipulating everyone in the most sneaky underhanded way, but I didn't get that at all. Mortenson was just a nurse who wanted to help people and had no business heading a huge nonprofit. He sucked with money, he sucked as a manager, he had zero capabilities to deal with the large scope of the organization. He lied and exaggerated in stories because he learned that people donate more money if the story sounds good.

I'm not trying to excuse him from any fault, but it was kind of a boring story. Maybe I'm just a cynic, but that's kind of what I expect from a lot of nonprofits. Sure it sucks, but he didn't come across as malicious. Just way out of his depths. It wouldn't have bothered me as much if Krakauer had tried at all to be fair or overcome his own biases, but he didn't. He really hates Mortenson, if his writing is any indication.

I could critique a lot more and give specific details, but I just don't care that much. If you've read Three Cups of Tea and you're interested in a rebuttal, or if you just want to learn more about Mortenson's controversies, you'd probably get something out of this. Even if you disagree with Krakauer, it might be worthwhile to hear a second side or give you more information to research. But otherwise, I don't think there's much here for you.

Mortenson has since been required to step down and pay the charity back a million dollars for funds used for his book promotion.

I really enjoyed this one. I didn't want to be the one person in the world who dislikes it, so I'm glad that it was just as good as everyone says. I was buddy reading this with a friend and wound up finishing a few days early because I couldn't make myself put it down.

The family dynamic in this was such a wonderful element. I loved Starr's relationship with her father, and for me that was one of the driving forces of the story. His character seemed to be subtly influencing every aspect, which I love in a YA novel because as a parent, that's his role in his kid's life. It wasn't an overt pressure, but the ideals and beliefs he passed on to Starr. I also just appreciate his character alone. He was as fully fleshed out as any main character.

In addition to the father, I also loved the other minor characters. They were all interesting and all propelled the story along. Each character fit so well into their role in the story. No one seemed out of place. I just wish there had been more time for some of them, like Kenya and her brother Seven. But her school friends were crafted really well and I really enjoyed the conflict created by Starr's two worlds.

The emotion was absolutely there for me. This book hits you hard and while I didn't cry, I definitely felt it. At the end of the day, this is the most important aspect of a book for me. I want a book to make me feel something, and this one definitely did.

The main reason this gets four stars instead of five is because of how fast paced this book is. I felt like I would blink and skip two scenes. I was fifty pages in when I realized there had already been about eight scenes. I just really wanted this book to slow down and take its time. Some things happened to quickly and I found myself having to reread sections in order to keep up because it was so easy to miss something small. It obviously didn't ruin the book for me, but I wish so badly there had been fewer scenes and elements just so it all could have been drawn out a little more.

I also felt like the last third of the book was kind of choppy. I was still completely engrossed, but when it started skipping time and jumping ahead, it didn't flow as well. It felt like an attempt to wrap the story up more quickly because it was taking too much time.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend to anyone who likes issue driven ya contemporaries. It was incredibly well done and I'll definitely be picking up more from Thomas.

Still a really enjoyable Karin Slaughter book, but I don't think this was one of my favorites.

For starters, I struggled with the storytelling style she used for a lot of this book. It was told in overlapping fragments of time from the points of view of Will Trent (main detective), his partner Faith, and his girlfriend Sara. They all start the book in different locations and the timeline covers all them. So for example (this is a made up example), the first chapter could be from Will's POV and take place from 1:32 until 1:58. Then the next chapter could be from Sara's POV and take place from 1:38 until 2:04. And so on. I could see this style working for some people, but I found it rather tedious when it became clear most of the book was written like this. And it technically never stopped doing that, but maybe around halfway or the last third, Slaughter eased back into more of her normal style. The exact time was listed at the top of every chapter, but it was less focused on getting every minute from every character and showing how much the timelines overlapped.

The other thing I didn't like as much was the main plot. I like cop thrillers to feel a little more down to earth than this book did. I like when they're hunting one criminal (or a small handful) who's committing crimes for himself. This book had a much larger scale. It wound up feeling kind of unrealistic. Or not even necessarily unrealistic, but just melodramatic. It was big. It was meant to be a huge, world altering event. And I'm just not a fan of that in books like this. I do wonder if it will have any impact on the world in the later books in the series, because it seems like it very well could. So again, not inherently a negative thing, just one I didn't like.

I was very invested in the story though. The twist was kind of obvious in parts (the terrorist group kidnapped someone from the CDC, what do you think their plan is), but I didn't figure out the whole plan until the end and that was pretty cool.

I also really like how all the characters lost their morals in this book. They were in a situation where they didn't have the luxury of the moral high ground, so they didn't even pretend. Like screw it, I may be a doctor, but this is a bad person so I'm not going to help them. It was kind of awesome.

Overall, I really enjoyed this despite the lower rating. She just made a few choices that I wasn't a huge fan of. I would highly recommend the Will Trent series if you enjoy cop thrillers because this is probably my favorite cop thriller series that I've ever read. It's fantastic and I'm sad to be caught up.

This book wasn't really anything I expected it to be. Since it's the second in the Night trilogy, I expected it to be a continuation of that story, more nonfiction about Wiesel's life. Instead this is a fictional story about Elisha, a Holocaust survivor fighting against British control in Palestine. At dawn another Israeli fighter is to be hanged and so Elisha is to kill an English prisoner.

I don't think this book is as powerful or important as Night is. Night hits hard on so many levels and I would recommend that book almost as a must read. This one I still enjoyed, but it doesn't feel like it has quite the same value. It almost feels like a what if continuation of Night. What if Wiesel's life had gone a different way, what if he wound up in Palestine instead of France, what if he too became a killer. Most of the book is just these musings on what if and Elisha philosophizing about his prior life and future actions.

I think it's absolutely beautifully written and translated. It has the same lyrical feel as Night where the writing itself draws me in. It's captivating just in terms of style. I think if you enjoyed Night, it's worth reading just on the basis of the writing alone.

But the story is also quite fascinating. Wiesel focuses a lot on Elisha's guilt and attempt to justify the murder he's about to commit. There are parallels drawn between what Elisha experienced under the SS officers in the camps and what John Dawson experiences under the Israeli fighters and Elisha himself. It takes place over the course of one night as Elisha struggles with his conscious.

I found it a fascinating take on trauma and manipulation, and how people can go down the road of terrorism. What I enjoyed specifically was how little it focused on the British or any atrocities committed by them. It's solely about Elisha, and the single atrocity he is about to commit. Elisha justifies it to himself, but it never felt like Wiesel did. It was a great exploration of a character.

I think at the end of the day, it was another great read. I love his prose more than anything, and while the story didn't hit me as hard as Night did, I think it's very worthwhile to read if you enjoyed Night. You will probably enjoy this one as well because I certainly did. I will definitely be finishing the trilogy at some point, but I don't feel a pressing need to read the last book anytime soon.

I was tempted to give this book three stars since I had a number of issues with it overall (despite enjoying it), but the ending left me super hyped to read the next book in the series. A great ending is enough to push this up an extra star for me.

What I liked most was the overarching story. I really enjoy the plot and the character's roles in the story. I think it's a really cool idea. I have some issues with the execution, but I really just want to see where the story goes. I can't guess how she's going to end it, and that's one of the things I enjoy about fantasy. Authors aren't tied to real world plot twists, which can make them harder to guess for me. I just can't picture the rest of the series' arc, and I'm excited to discover it.

I think this book relied a little too heavily on using tradition as a justification for everything that happened. I know that's much more common in fantasy and since it's a different world, you do have to accept it to a degree, but it felt like too much in this book for me. There was so much that was inherently a little too absurd. Three sisters who have to kill each other to become queen and spend a decade training, a former queen who leaves as soon as giving birth and stops being queen. Like why? It seems like a ridiculous way to govern, and I really felt like I needed more reason behind it than was given. But perhaps that will come later in the series.

I've heard complaints that this book was too slow and while I wouldn't necessarily call it slow, I understand what people mean. It felt like it skipped a lot of development. There were a lot of things going on in this book, but the fighting hasn't started yet and the three queens are preparing to fight. It skipped around between POVs and it felt like there was nearly a full novel for each queen, but then it got cut down into this book. We didn't get to see the natural progression. The characters would say they were going to do something, and by the time we came back to those characters, the thing would already be half done. For example, Kat's teacher wants her to learn to flirt in order to win the hearts of the suitors. We're told this at the end of the chapter. By the next chapter about Kat, they're talking about what a little flirt she's become and the progress she's made. I felt like for much of this book we skipped the steps in between and it lacked a natural flow.

I didn't trust most of the characters. A few were because they were untrustworthy, but in large part it was because they all felt fake to me. With only a few exceptions, none of the characters felt super real. Because they felt fake, it translated into their actions coming across as pretend. I could never tell who was lying and who lacked enough characterization for me to believe them.

That also translated into the romances feeling shallow and fake. I literally didn't believe them. There was so little chemistry I still don't think any of them were real. A character would profess love for one person and then turn around a profess love for a different person, and I didn't care either way because they both felt painfully fake. I really like romance, but it just didn't work for me here.

It sounds like a lot of negative for a four star book, but I was so here for the story. I loved the different factions with the poisoners, naturalists, and elementals. I loved the murder dynamic between the sisters and the different ways they were raised by their guardians. And I really loved the ending.

For all its flaws, it was a really worthwhile book for me. I'm glad I read it and even more excited to continue on and read the rest of the series. I'm hoping they just improve from here.

I don't think I would label this book as a thriller. If you come looking for a thriller, you may be disappointed. It's more of a study on the psychology on trauma (with a few thrills). The focus is almost entirely on these four girls, now women, who were with their friend when she was abducted, raped, and murdered. Once I adjusted my expectations, I really loved this book.

The story was so compelling. I wanted to know the stories of these women, what they were thinking, what they did at the time, why. It was fascinating. I didn't care so much about the resolution as I did just these people's lives. Every single narrator in this book drew me in and made me invested, which isn't always easy to do in multiple POV books.

One of the reviews on the back of my copy praises Minato's Confessions for making "the horrors follow each other as logically as pearls on a string" and I really understood that in reading this one. Despite not truly being what I would consider a thriller, there are a lot of horrific elements of murder, rape, abuse, etc in nearly every chapter. Yet within her writing, it all feels normal within the story. In another book perhaps I would feel some disbelief, but not here. I completely bought into this world and story.

I will say the storytelling structure Minato used felt very forced. Each chapter is a separate girl telling her story directly to Emily's mother (the girl who had been killed when they were children). The first does it through a letter, the second a PTA meeting, etc. I've read books that have a similar structure before and I rarely enjoy it. It doesn't come across as natural so much as a cheap ploy to make it stand out. But in this one, it didn't bother me much at all. I did notice it was awkward and forced, but I was so invested in the story that I didn't care.

I loved the mother's character, especially how she appeared to each of the girls. She threatened them a few years after her daughters death, telling them she expected penance or the murderer to be caught before the statute of limitations was up. Each girl reacted in a different way and that was in many ways, the crux of the story. Emily's murder may have been an important moment in all the characters' lives, but the mother's threats set the events of this book in motion. It was a really well done element and I loved seeing all the perspectives on it, from those who thought it was unfair to those who wanted to live up to it and others who had forgotten it entirely.

I would definitely recommend this book if you're looking for a discussion on psychological effects of trauma. I think some people approaching this as a thriller will be disappointed by the lack of climax and "thrills," but I loved it. It's definitely more introspective and reflective than a traditional thriller, but wonderful if you enjoy that kind of thing. This has me very excited to pick up Confessions.