You are going to need a strong stomach to take on Karin Slaughter’s latest offering, Pretty Girls, a 540 page journey into human depravity and proof that no person knows another completely.
When, uncharacteristically, Paul Scott convinces his wife, Claire, to engage in some against-the-wall, back-alley sex the couple is mugged and Paul is declared dead from stab wounds.
Claire returns from his funeral to find her house ransacked and is surprised that very senior detectives – and the FBI – are taking an unexpected interest in what is really a mundane break-in, while her husband’s murder seems to have been relegated to the superficial attention of some low-grade investigator.
As Claire tries to pick up the pieces of her life she finds, on her husband’s computer, movies involving torture, rape and murder – something in which she would never have dreamed Paul had any interest.
The victims are all young women who have obviously been snatched from the streets.
Are the movies real or just make-believe snuff films?
Twenty-four years previously Claire’s own sister, Julia, was abducted and never heard of again.
This led to her father’s suicide and her other sister, Lydia, becoming a junkie and, after her claims were not believed that Paul had tried to rape her, severing all ties with her family.
When visiting the cemetery, Claire discovers Lydia about to urinate on Paul’s grave and she realises that Paul may well have tried to rape her sister.
Why else would Lydia have such contempt for him?
Forced to delve deeper into Paul’s clandestine life and as his dark side becomes ever more repugnant, Claire decides, despite her initial anger at her sister, to ask Lydia to help her through the morass into which she has been thrown.
Pretty Girls is a good story with all the prerequisite plot twists, but while normally Slaughter’s novels are unputdownable, this one is overwritten to the point of tedium and would have benefited mightily by being 100 or so pages shorter.
It’s not a bad story and it’s delightfully convoluted.
You’ll just need perseverance.
But it will pay off.
