Product Description

Saturday night dates at the skating rink have been a tradition in the small southern town of Heartsdale for as long as anyone can remember. But when a teenage quarrel explodes into a deadly shoot-out, Sara Linton - the town's paediatrician and medical examiner - finds herself entangled in a terrible tragedy. What seemed at first to be a horrific but individual catastrophe proves to have wider implications. The autopsy reveals evidence of long term - abuse, of ritualistic self-mutilation, but when Sara and police chief Jeffrey Tolliver start to investigate, they are frustrated at every turn. The children surrounding the victim close ranks. The families turn their backs. Then a young girl is abducted, and it becomes clear that the first death is linked to an even more brutal crime, one far more shocking than anyone could have imagined. And unless Sara and Jeffrey can uncover the deadly secrets the children hide, it's going to happen again...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3014 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Kisscut is a reminder that Karin Slaughter has--with just one previous novel--built a reputation as one of the most powerful and astringent thriller writers at work today. In fact, Slaughter's work represents a development of the Southern Gothic strain, and like so many of her illustrious predecessors, she is adept at exploring the darker reaches of the human psyche. As her last book, Blindsighted, sold over 25,000 copies, it would seem that many of us have become Slaughter aficionados.

Kisscut begins with a particularly explosive opening. In the car park of a skating rink in the small southern town of Heartsdale, chief of police Jeffrey Tolliver witnesses a teenage girl pointing a gun at a man. But the detective, there for a date with his ex-wife Sara (the town's medical examiner and paediatrician), is obliged to shoot the girl to save the boy's life. The subsequent autopsy brings to light a gallery of horrors, and as Tolliver and Sara undertake a particularly difficult investigation, they are met with a wall of silence.

Slaughter is now routinely compared to Thomas Harris, and the comparisons are not far-fetched. We're used to unflinching forensic detail these days (courtesy of such writers as Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell), but Slaughter is adept at unsettling the reader in a whole host of ways, not least through her recurrent suggestion that the patina of normality sustaining her characters is very thin indeed. Jeffrey and Sara's faltering relationship is richly drawn, though we find reduced attention given to their private problems as the novel progresses and the focus shifts more to the author's polished and consummate handling of the tortuous plot. --Barry Forshaw

Review
This follow-up to Blindsighted by the appropriately named Slaughter is definitely not for the faint-hearted. It's a horrifying, atrocious and completely gripping crime novel of a very modern variety. Again, the leading characters are paediatrician Sara Linton and Detective Lena Adams. The August heat is creating a mini-crime wave in Heartsdale, a small town in South Georgia. Fights are breaking out all over town, including at the local skating rink, where Sara is on a date with her ex-husband, police chief Jeffrey Tolliver. But this particular fight has far worse implications than anybody could imagine possible. A 13-year-old girl is shot dead and a story unfolds of such horror that it is sometimes difficult to go on reading the book. Sara, Jeffrey and Lena cannot seem to break the impenetrable ranks of the dead girl's friends and family, until another girl is kidnapped and the truth is slowly revealed. It's hard to describe the storyline without giving too much away, but suffice it to say that pregnancy, self-abuse, ritual mutilation and religion are all involved. If it was not written so well it would be easy to dismiss Slaughter's work as sensationalist. But her characters are real, interesting people and the plot is so absorbing that even at its most horrific you won't be able to put it down. (Kirkus UK)

Michael Connelly
'This is crime fiction at its finest.'