criminal by Karin Slaughter.

Evelyn Mitchell, Amanda Wagner, Will Trent, Sara Linton and Faith Mitchell continue on from Karin’s last novel Fallen. All her books are stand alone thrillers and do not have to be read in order but fans will enjoy reading more about her 5 core characters. By reading criminal after Fallen it is like meeting up with the same friends again a week or so later. This is another crime thriller where the police investigate and catch a killer.

Karin is a very talented author and her writing is crisp and packs a punch…

...The needle.

That finely honed piece of surgical steel, that seemingly innocuous device of delivery that ruled every moment of Lucy’s life. She dreamed about shooting up. That first prick of flesh. That pinch as the tip pierced vein. That slow burn as the liquid was injected. That immediate euphoria of the drug entering her system. It was worth everything. Worth every sacrifice. Worth every loss. Worth the things she had to do to get it. Worth the things she all but forgot about the second the drug entered her bloodstream.

Then, suddenly, came the crest of the last hill, the biggest hill, on her roller coaster ride down…

...The bikers sold speed, not heroin. Heroin belonged to the coloreds. Even the Mafia was hands-off. H was a ghetto drug. It was too potent, too addictive, too dangerous for white people. Especially white women.

Which is how Lucy ended up being tricked out by a black man with a tattoo of Jesus on his chest.

The spoon. The flame. The smell of burning rubber. The tourniquet. The filter from a broken cigarette. There was a romantic pageantry to the whole thing, a drawn-out process that made her former affair with the needle seem woefully unsophisticated. Even now, Lucy could feel herself getting excited at the thought of the spoon. She closed her eyes, imagining the bent piece of silver, the way the neck resembled a broken swan. Black swan. Black sheep. Black man’s whore…

I enjoyed reading this book which has a very involved plot, a plot spreading across nearly 40 years. But that is the problem with this book, Karin floats from chapter to chapter between 1975 and the present day. In the 1975 chapters Evelyn and Amanda are on the chase of a killer. In the present day chapters Amanda, Will and Faith are on the chase of a killer. The story builds in both time zones and as a reader you slowly start to learn what is going on but Will and Faith have no knowledge of Evelyn’s and Amanda’s work in 1975. Karin decided to adopt this twin time zone structure for her novel but I found reading it a strain. Chopping and changing through the decades was hard to remember as both investigations developed at a similar pace. You had to remind yourself that Will and Faith did not know what was happening in 1975 and it seemed odd that the reader knows more than the present day detectives. However, everything slots into place by the end and you understand then the dynamics between Amanda and Will. I thought criminal was a good read with some creepy bits that quite surprised me. I will vote criminal 4 stars and NOT 5 stars only because of the chopping and changing between 2 time zones.

Thank you to the passenger who left behind their copy of this paperback on my coach. I did not toss it into the rubbish skip but considered this a bonus to take home with me to enjoy later.

criminal has 510 pages and was written in 2012.