Blindsighted

Well, as I was about to pick up Blindsighted and having heard good things about Karin Slaughter (yes, this is the first book I have read of hers) I felt like there should be a sign saying: Welcome to Heartsdale, a small town in Georgia where many murders are about to commence!Blindsighted revolves around three main characters.First, there is Sara Linton, a pediatrician who also works as the town's coroner. Sara moved back to her hometown after finishing her residency in Atlanta. She's well respected and liked. She was married to the chief of Police, Jeffrey Tolliver until he cheated. She still cares for him but she tries to keep her distance.Jeffrey knows he made a huge mistake when he hurt Sara and lost her at the same time. He has been trying to make amends without really gaining any ground. As the police chief, he's good at his job and he wants his town to be a safe place to live in.Lena Adams is the only female cop in town. She's a smart woman. She also carries a lot of anger. She lost her parents when she was too young and she and her sister went to live with her uncle, Hank, who was a drug addict and alcoholic. Now as an adult, she doesn't have a good relationship with Hank but when her twin sister is found murdered in a dinner, her sole purpose in life is to find the man capable of such violence towards her twin.Sara is the first one to find the victim. Because of her job, she will need to interact with Jeffrey. Lena is determined to find the murderer and get some justice even if she has to break protocol and defy her chief.Blindsighted had a great cast. I like Sara. She was smart, resourceful and independent. I wasn't sure about Lena. She was too angry and defiant but by the end, I was hurting for her. Jeffrey, I'm not sure yet. He was good as a cop but he had no good excuse for cheating (just in case, there is NO excuse). I do feel like he loves Sara and I'm willing to wait and see where their relationship goes from here.In regards to the unsub. He was EVIL. What he did to the women he kidnapped was unspeakable. I felt sick just reading those scenes. I don't know where Karin got her ideas but they were revolting.Overall, I can say I enjoyed it and it grabbed my attention from beginning to end. Knowing this, I'm ready to continue with the rest of the books in this series. I already purchased Kisscut.Cliffhanger: No4/5 Fangs

BLINDSIGHTED [GRANT COUNTY BOOK #1] By KARIN SLAUGHTERMY REVIEW FIVE STARS*****I was a fan of Karin Slaughter's novels over a decade ago, but became reacquainted with her works rather recently in a somewhat unusual fashion. To be brief, I spotted CRIMINAL (her 6th installment of the WILL TRENT BOOKS) on a list [SERIAL KILLER THRILLERS: TEN OF THE BEST]. courtesy of CrimeFictionLover.Com. Instead of taking a direct route and buying a copy of CRIMINAL, I opted to read all of Slaughter's WILL TRENT BOOKS in chronological order, to include my "target" (CRIMINAL), and three of the novels that followed in the series. I stopped only after reading UNSEEN BOOK 7 (2013). I am "coming back" for A KEPT WOMAN (Book 8 of the WILL TRENT SERIES).It occurred to me that I had cheated myself by not REALLY going back to the beginning, that is, to before Karin Slaughter was a household name. Her debut novel BLINDSIGHTED awaited me, the book that first introduced pediatrician and coroner Dr. Sara Linton (and the small town setting of Grant County, Georgia).I finished reading BLINDSIGHTED early last month, but I'm just getting around to leaving a review. It was dubbed an "ME thriller" pretty much out of the gate per some reviews I glanced at or even "Thomas Harris Meets Patricia Cornwell". It was my impression that the editorial reviews were in some cases lackluster or even on the negative side due to the critics having set an extraordinarily high bar given the pre-release praise. This was circa 2001 and I was reading Cornwell during the '90's and gobbling up every new release of this amazing author's work. Thomas Harris was deemed an incomparable author with perhaps the most original villain in crime fiction history with the likes of Dr. Hannibal Lector. I was proudly displaying hardcover editions of The Red Dragon and SOL at this time, and Cornwell's ME novels was a high bar to be sure.But I digress---the thing is---I just wasn't expecting to be exactly "blown away" by the first Slaughter novel BLINDSIGHTED (2001). Some reviewers were declaring that Sara Linton "is no Kay Scarpetta" and that Slaughter's villain was no more than "a mere shadow of the complex, chilling Hannibal.." The truth is that had I read BLINDSIGHTED in 2001 I might not have found it to be a serial killer thriller with such a smart, intuitive, likeable female protagonist, nail-biting suspense, and with such an intriguing sociopathic sexual predator. Looking at this novel nearly two decades down the pages of times, I am THRILLED that Sara is no Kay Scarpetta, and while I love Hannibal Lector, it is Karin Slaughter who has risen to the challenge of continuing to thrill us with her GRANT COUNTY BOOK series and her intersecting series of BOOKS featuring the indomitable Will Trent with all of the ancillary characters in his universe. She is the author who sets the newest gold standard for excellence. She did not stop writing after half a dozen novels, or continue to write but with diminishing returns. We refer to "Early Cornwell", "Early Patterson". "Early Koontz".. and at least in my case "Early Stephen King" for a reason.I loved so many aspects of BLINDSIGHTED, but I'll try to describe just a few. It was MY first introduction to the world of Lena Adams, a young woman hand-picked from the academy by Police Chief Jeffrey Tolliver, largely because of her relentless desire to serve as well as succeed as a cop, later a detective. Lena wears a proverbial "chip on (her) shoulder" with the same "in your face" fierceness as she wears her badge and gun. The reader learns that Lena's background is one of poverty and painful personal loss that leaves her emotionally guarded and hobbled by serious intimacy issues. She distances herself from everyone in her orbit with the sole exception of her twin sister Sibyl. It is thus a devastating emotional blow to her entire being when Sybil is violated and viciously murdered in the opening pages of the novel. She pushes potential allies away, including her only remaining blood relative (Hank, the uncle who raised her and Sibyl), her boss Jeffrey, and naturally any psychological counseling. Lena's rage is barely contained, and her own self-worth is directly tied to her Detective Shield. It is Lena's story that captivates me the most in the novel.It is within the context of interchanges between Jeffrey and Lena that the reader learns more about Lena's belief system. Her perception of the targets of sexual predators, the victims of rape is simply shocking --- she places the blame on the female, i.e., that it is only the weak, stupid, or unprepared that are victimized. It is such misogynistic garbage being uttered from the lips of a young woman it made me want to gasp. But then we are given more reasons to dislike Lena than to sympathize with her. Her Uncle Hank (who raised the twin girls) comes to town following Sibyl's murder. He is a recovered drug addict/alcoholic who bears the scars of needle tracks on his arms while the scars inside his psyche will never heal, only be rendered more bearable by the service he can provide to Lena in particular and humanity in general. Lena is hostile and even aggressive toward him, outwardly demonstrating her hatred, shame, and disdain for this man who made horrible mistakes yet paid his dues. Perhaps even more inflammatory and harder to take is Lena's actions toward her murdered sister's lover and life partner. She approached her own sister's lesbianism with anger, denial, and shame when she was alive. Ruefully not much changes when Sybil is gone and lost to Lena, her partner who loved her, and the gay community who welcomed them both with friendship. Lena confronts Nan with anger, a lack of empathy and compassion that is staggering. She is cold, distant, and unsympathetic---her "go-to" emotional coping strategies. We get to know the young Lena as a unforgiving, misogynistic, and homophobic bitch. It becomes easy to grasp why that the mature Dr. Linton had little time for the impulsive, perpetually angry hellcat that was Lena Adams.Before I forget, Slaughter used her "single-word title" here, and I always enjoy trying to decipher her intent and the undercurrent of her choices. In this case it meshes with the author's intriguing use of BELLADONNA as the drug of choice that our villainous lust killer uses to facilitate his horrendous crimes against his female victims. In fact, the word "blindsighted" strictly speaking refers to the ability of a person without sight to nevertheless be able to sense objects within the environment. BELLADONNA is a drug which creates a perception problem in an otherwise sighted person. The victim may discern properties that are associated with an object but their perception is distorted to the extent that they can't identify the object. This side effect and other properties of belladonna make it an incredibly interesting choice, more mind-bending than LSD. But for the purpose of the novel, at first blush I felt that it translated to point out that our protagonists viewed everything in front of them in full Technicolor, and yet could not tell what they were really seeing. Specifically, they could not put the pieces together.I am not especially concerned about spoiler alerts, but "just in case" there is an "old" Slaughter fan out there like me that is just now getting around to reading BLINDSIGHTED, I'll just say that Lena lives to rue her earlier assessments of a lot of things, including what it means to be a victim, and how she perceives some of the people in her orbit. The back story of Sara's time in Atlanta and what prompted her to return to GRANT COUNTY, the interplay between Sara and Jeffrey (set two years following their divorce), and the race against time to intercept and stop the trajectory of a remorseless sadistic sexual predator from killing again...this is intense, mesmerizing, and absolutely riveting stuff. I REALLY enjoyed this book and look forward to reading all of the books included in the entire GRANT COUNTY series.

Karin Slaughter can write. She creates vivid characters and situations and constructs sturdy narratives. She deserves to be ranked along with the other big names in crime fiction but for me she has one flaw, one tendency to excess that undermines her efforts and nearly makes me turn away and stop reading.She seems to love to dwell on the grislier details of the violence inflicted by the monsters who populate her stories, and on the macabre and gruesome anatomical details of autopsies. For my taste she goes overboard. She'll go on and on, paragraph after paragraph, entire pages of images I really do not want in my brain. I end up skipping long passages rather than subject myself to the stomach turning disgusting vomit inducing aspects of violence, sexual depravity and horrible death she gleefully describes in the greatest detail. Some of the tortures inflicted on the victims in the story are so fiendishly awful and so creatively sick I won't even try to describe them. In my opinion she needs a stronger editor.If I want horror I'll stick with that hack Steven King.

I had been looking forward to reading this book after seeing that it had so many good reviews. What a big disappointment . It was dreadful. Dull, boring and extremely unlikeable characters and a horrid storyline. It was quite nasty. Was it really necessary to go into such gory detail. Did it add to the story? Absolutely not. I shan’t be buying any more from this author.

The last thing Sara Linton, Paediatrician and Medical Examiner for Grant County, expects to find when she goes to the bathroom in her local diner is a dying woman and despite her best efforts it’s too late to save her. Professor Sybil Adams has been brutally attacked with two deep knife wounds to her stomach forming a cross but once Sara carries out her full examination the true extent of the horrors visited on her are realised and when another girl is found with injuries consistent with having been crucified Sara and her ex-husband, Police Chief Jeffery Tolliver, realise they are dealing with a violent sexual predator turned serial killer. Can they stop him before he is able to hurt anyone else?As regular readers of my blog will be aware I have read other books in this series and am now going back to the beginning so I can read them properly and go on the journey with the characters. It does mean that some parts of this book were less shocking than they would have been if I hadn’t read books from further down the line but that is my own fault and it certainly didn’t spoil my enjoyment of this at all.I absolutely love a well written crime thriller and this definitely hit the mark. Slaughter expertly weaves her stories with little clues dotted here and there so you feel like you’re trying to solve the crime along with the characters. I also love that sometimes we know more than certain characters so there was one scene in particular where I wanted to scream at a character who the killer was because the clues suddenly all added up and hit me.I loved some of the twists and turns that Slaughter took me on as well as the insights into small town America in the south. There’s some excellent foreshadowing around Lena Adams in particular, which I picked up on having read “A Faint Cold Fear” last month and I’m very much looking forward to reading the next book to see what’s next for her and how we get from who she is in this book to who she is in “A Faint Cold Fear” and even later in the Will Trent series where I’ve also seen her pop up.I particularly liked the way Slaughter reveals information about her characters’ pasts. Rather than pages of description to tell us what has gone on with them in the past we find things out alongside other characters in a much more organic fashion. I’m trying not to give away any spoilers because there was one thing that I already knew because of the other books I’ve read but the way it’s revealed in this book was so well handled I really wish I hadn’t already known it. She doesn’t spoon feed facts to her readers but rather trusts them to just jump straight in and go on the journey with her characters.I can see why Slaughter is held in such high regard by so many fans of the crime thriller genre, I cannot fault her writing at all. It’s gripping and she really pulls you into the world she has created. I genuinely couldn’t put this down and have been flying through it in huge chunks at a time.

Poor characterisation, generally dull writing, with enough regular gratuitous sexual violence to keep the reader awake! First book that I have read from the author. Will be the last! Please read more of the one and two star reviews available, as others have summed up my thoughts about the book more eloquently than I am able!

This is Karin Slaughter's first book. It is an interesting, if somewhat, gross read (which, I'm finding is par for the course for Slaughter, I'm starting to find).In this book, Sara Linton is back in her home town. She's a paediatrician, and the coroner for the Podunk Georgia town she lives in with her ex-husband, the local Chief of Police. It's your typical small town. Everyone knows your business, in that way only small town people are, but it's still a shock when the sister of one of the detectives turns up horrifically murdered. As the book/investigation progresses, we develop a picture of the town, and the relationships between Linton, Jeffery Tolliver (the Chief), and Lena Adams, the detective with the dead sister.The book feels a little "first book" (i.e. a little busy, a little too much information), but it was a good read, all the same. There was one part, relating to Linton, that stretched credibility, but it was enjoyable, all the same.

I decided to download this book after hearing an interview with the author on the Graham Norton radio show when she was promoting her latest book. Having researched the author's back catalogue I decided to start with the Grant County series, of which, Blindsighted is the first of 6.I found this to be an easy read, a page-turner with believable, likeable characters who I will want to read more about. The story was well developed but as this is my favourite genre I guessed who the perpetrator was quite early. Whilst this didn't spoil my enjoyment of the book, I felt that editing of it could have been better & it could have been around 10 pages shorter.I have already downloaded the next book in the series & I intend to read a stand alone book by the same author in the future.