Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter
Published: July 2nd 2015 by Century
Genre: Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense.
Pages: 544

Usually a book that’s over 500 pages digs pretty deep, but for some reason I didn’t feel like this one did. It was a fast paced and quick read, entertaining on many levels, and waaaay to much on other levels.

The story is about two sisters – Claire and Lydia – who loses their eldest sister Julia. Julia just disappears and nobody knows what happened to her, leaving the family to a faith of wondering and eventually tearing them apart.

Twenty-something years later, Claire is a housewife to a controlling millionaire and Lydia is a single mother on the wagon struggling to make ends meet. They don’t speak. That is until Claire’s husband is murdered in an alley and the sisters meet again as Lydia sits pissing on her deceased husband’s grave. Old wounds are torn open and they find a connection between their lost sister and Claire’s dead husband. Together they set out to get closure.

For me, there were a little too many coincidences too be believable. Also it was a little too much and the story bases itself on a pretty disgusting and cruel urban legend that I don’t even dare to mention – that’s how gross and disgusting it is.

If you are easily offended, this is not the book for you. Slaugther lives up to her name and really tears you and everything else apart. I cringed several times and I wanted to look away, but it’s a book and not a movie. Sometimes I felt it was a little too much, and I could have done without the detailed violence towards women. Nobody needs to know that many details about anything. It’s disturbing, it’s gross, it’s ugly and it’s shocking. And it keeps doing it all the way through.

It doesn’t dig too deep into emotions and it tells you everything and shows you nothing. While I’m the kind of reader that likes to see it for myself and not having everything spelled out for me. I also like to leave certain things to the imagination, and nothing was left to the imagination on this one.

The parts I liked the most and that made me warm up to the book and not write it off as a heartless gory monster, was the letters from the father. All the heart lies there and it saved the book for me. I can’t say I’m left very excited about the book, but if you like them fast, dark and twisty, I’d recommend this one! It is most definitely that!