Book Review - Snatched

Snatched – Karin Slaughter

This year has seen a number of authors right a series of short stories and releasing them on the Kindle. Some are standalones, but others have involved their mainstay characters in the series they are known for. They have received with various degress of success. Tess Gerritsen for example released the extremely short (blink and you’ll miss it) “freaks.” The book featured Rizzoli and Isles but really was a bit of fluff. A nice 5 minute time filler but nothing more.

This book features Will Trent, one of Karin Slaughter’s main characters. At 72 pages it is a respectable length. Although it does feature the longest blurb for a novel its size!!

The blurb:

Will Trent, a dedicated agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for fifteen years, knows that there's definitely such a thing as a cop's intuition. Which is why he should have listened to his own.

While in an airport restroom at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International, Will overhears a girl's pleading, plaintive voice: "Please, I wanna go home." Something isn't right here, thinks Will. He feels it in his gut. But he waits too long to act, and now the girl and the anxious, angry man she's with have disappeared into the crowds at the busiest passenger airport in the world.

After a desperate search and with time running out, Will makes a call to his supervisor, Amanda Wagner. Will's partner, Faith Mitchell, immediately sends out an abducted child alert. The entire airport will soon be grinding to a halt: Eighty-nine million passengers a year. Five runways. Seven concourses. Six million square feet of space that sprawled across two counties, three cities, and five jurisdictions. All shut down on a dime because Will has a hunch that he is certain is true: a girl, maybe six or seven years old, has been snatched from God knows where. And he intends to bring her back--no matter what it takes.

Unlike her recent books, Snatched focuses purely on Will Trent and his colleagues. The characters from the Grant County series are nowhere to be seen. In fact, Will’s colleagues are only peripheral characters in this novella. The story is all about Will performing a mundane duty and trusting his gut feeling when he senses something suspicious.

What follows is a tense action sequence as Will pursues the suspect through an airport and then the fallout from the action.

For anyone looking for an idea of what Karin Slaughter’s writing is all about, this is the perfect book for you to try. Her writing is tight, Will is described in the perfect way so that regular readers are not patronised and new readers get a sense of the type of character he is all about.

The plot itself is riveting and Karin could easily have squeezed out a full length novel around the premise. I applaud her for not doing this however, as the book works well in its current length.

All in all a quick but fully satisfying read, that whets the appetite for her imminent new novel. The closing lines are uncharacteristically cheesy for a Karin Slaughter novel but I can live with that.

My rating: 8.5