Triptych

Karin Slaughter is darker, bleaker and better with this stand-alone, TRIPTYCH (Delacorte Press, c2006, ISBN 978-0-385-33946-9), in my opinion.
The book begins:

Detective Michael Ormewood listened to the football game on the radio as he drove down DeKalb Avenue toward Grady Homes.

John Shelley is newly paroled from prison after doing a stint of 25 years after his conviction for the rape and murder of 15-year-old Mary Alice Finney. But there's a problem for John: similar murders are occuring and the similarities could land John back to prison, someplace he does not what to go.

Angie Polaski works undercover for the Vice Squad and meets John while working the streets and Will Trent is an agent with the GBI,(Georgia Bureau of Investigation) brought in to work on the cases in question.
The three make up the triptych of the story, their lives paralleling each others in more ways than one.

Okay, so this book is not for the weak-stomached. I have written before that I thought I was jaded to violence in books, grit and gore, that nothing seemed to bother me anymore in the books I read.

This book bothered me. On several levels. And there was one scene...I was reading on the couch and my jaw literally dropped because the revelation sucker-punched me right in the head and I had to read it again just to make sure I read it correctly. And then I read it one more time, just to make sure.

This book is not recommended for people who won't read about crimes against women or crimes against children and I wouldn't call the graphic violence gratuitous, but be warned that there is quite a bit of it. I would recommend it however, to everyone else. Even those people who really like her Grant County series.
Just leave a light on for this one.