Fractured
by Karin Slaughter
Summary
With its gracious homes and tree-lined streets, Ansley Park is one of Atlanta’s most desirable neighborhoods. But in one gleaming mansion, a girl has been savagely murdered. Her horrified mother stands amid shattered glass, having killed her daughter’s attacker with her bare hands.
Detective Will Trent of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is sure that another teenage girl is missing, and that a killer is on the loose.
Armed with only fleeting clues, teamed with a female cop who has her own personal reasons for hating him, Trent has enemies all around him—and a gnawing feeling that this case, which started in the best of homes, is cutting quick and deep through the ruins of perfect lives broken wide-open: where human demons emerge with a vengeance.
Excerpt
Chapter One
Will Trent stared out the window of the car as he listened to his boss yell into her cell phone. Not that Amanda Wagner ever really raised her voice, but she had a certain edge to her tone that had caused more than one of her agents to burst into tears and walk off an active investigation—no mean feat considering the majority of her subordinates at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation were men.
“We’re at”—she craned her neck, squinting at the street sign—“the Prado and Seventeenth.” Amanda paused. “Perhaps you could look up the information on your computer?” She shook her head, obviously not liking what she was hearing.
Will tried, “Maybe we should keep driving around? We might find—”
Amanda covered her eyes with her hand. She whispered into the phone, “How long until the server is back up?” The answer caused her to breathe out a heavy, pronounced sigh.
Will indicated the screen dominating the middle of the wood-lined dashboard. The Lexus had more bells and whistles than a clown’s hat. “Don’t you have GPS?”
She dropped her hand, considering his question, then began fiddling with some knobs on the dashboard. The screen didn’t change, but the air-conditioning whirred higher. Will chuckled, and she cut him off with a nasty look, suggesting, “Maybe while we’re waiting for Caroline to find a street map, you can get the owner’s manual out of the glove box and read the directions for me.”
Will tried the latch, but it was locked. He thought this pretty much summed up his relationship with Amanda Wagner. She often sent him the way of locked doors and expected him to find his way around them. Will liked a good puzzle as much as the next man, but just once, it would have been nice to have Amanda hand him the key.
Or maybe not. Will had never been good at asking for help—especially from someone like Amanda, who seemed to keep a running list in her head of people who owed her favors.
He looked out the window as she berated her secretary for not keeping a street map on her person at all times. Will had been born and raised in Atlanta, but didn’t often find himself in Ansley Park. He knew that it was one of the city’s oldest and wealthiest neighborhoods, where over a century ago, lawyers, doctors and bankers had built their enviable estates so that future lawyers, doctors and bankers could live as they did—safely cloistered in the middle of one of the most violent metropolitan cities this side of the Mason-Dixon. The only thing that had changed over the years was that the black women pushing white babies in strollers were better compensated these days.
With its twisting turns and roundabouts, Ansley seemed designed to confuse, if not discourage, visitors….
Copyright © 2008 by Karin Slaughter. Excerpted by permission of The Bantam Dell Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
Reviews
“Heartpounding…. Raw energy …will leave readers clamouring for the next installment”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“[W]orks on the level of both plot and character…. [And] the combination is unbeatable”—Cleveland Plain-Dealer
“Unexpected twists and intriguing characters”—Entertainment Weekly
Author's Biography
Karin Slaughter is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of Beyond Reach, Triptych, Faithless, A Faint Cold Fear, which was named an International Book-of-the-Month Club selection, Indelible, Kisscut, and Blindsighted; she contributed to and edited Like a Charm. She is a native of Georgia, where she currently lives and is working on her next novel.