I think this novel generally is realistic and true to life. It's about child sexual abuse, using the vehicle of a mystery series genre story. If you are sensitive or triggered, I wouldn't recommend reading this novel. However, if you are curious or want to be aware how sometimes sexual abuse works invisibly in our society, and how it affects victims, I highly recommend this novel. The main hero characters are from a small town and a small county with the pressures of a close community, but they are proactive in seeking legal, medical and social solutions once they are aware of what has been happening. It wasn't always so. A major flaw in the novel is how easily the parts of the puzzle come to light and are put together by the characters. I think real life is more like 'Chinatown', the movie, and superheroes don't exist in real life.My childhood was a ruin similar to the victims in this book. I survived it, but not without costs. Let's call my childhood neighborhood Evergreen Gulch.To the outside world, we were a mixed-/low- income area. We lived in an unincorporated urban area. On the south side of Evergreen Gulch district across a street the real city began; and on my street, the north side had blocks of empty grassy fields between blocks of houses, some kept up and some wrecked. No sidewalks. Open ditches. Beater cars. Unlicensed and uninsured everything. Lawns a parody of the word. When adults worked, they were in 'entry level' jobs forever. How could they advance into good paying jobs with almost no ability to read or write? Lives were interrupted because of WWII or the Great Depression or prejudice. Others spent decades of their own, current lives on Welfare, some families going back three generations on Welfare. But it wasn't all consistently poor and ignorant residents. A couple of blocks would look similar to a third world neighborhood, and then there would be a block or two of comfortable middle-class homes, with nice cars and mowed lawns.This was 60 years ago. No internet. Four national TV stations which began broadcasting at 5 AM and went off the air at midnight. Only AM radio stations. Starting at the middle school level, schools had two tracks of education - college or 'technical', depending on the family's wealth and involvement. 'Technical' educated female kids, which was almost 90% of all females whether middle-class or poor, were not expected to get a high school diploma which would get them into college. Poor parents often were terrified of books and teachers and schools. My parents were in this category. My father often acted as if books were poisonous to touch, but he knew the school required books to come home with schoolchildren, and parents could get in serious trouble if they didn't send their kids to school, so it was the one thing he allowed me to keep, thinking them all from school. So at the time, the Salvation Army store with the shelves of 5 cent paperbacks and the public library were my hangouts of safety. Evergreen Gulch was made up mostly of second and third generation European white trash, with a sprinkle of Native Americans amongst us that the white trash thought of as the 'real' trash people. Everyone was very religious, mostly Protestants. Drug of choice was alcohol, with sleeping pills or diet pills as a chaser. Officially, child abuse and wife abuse was not a crime - literally. There weren't any laws on the books under which to charge an offender because raping your children or beating/torturing your family wasn't a criminal act. Abusers were not either offenders or criminals by any definition. Some, but only some, people thought family abuse was immoral. After all, it was a biblical commandment for men to 'correct' their women and children (and slaves), and socially, fathers, if they still were around, being drunk and raging most nights was normal. Everyone went to a church on Sundays. If your father, most common, or mother, not so common, almost killed you or tortured or raped you, there was no one to stop it or any place to go for help. Parents raping or beating their kids to a pulp wasn't a crime. It wasn't in the news, no one ever was arrested for it; however, it was common in neighborhoods of poor people (but even we who lived there didn't know it where it was going on), and no one talked about it. We knew who was on welfare and we knew which fathers and mothers drank so much they spilled out into the streets or bars regularly. That's all.It was only decades later, when we survivors began to talk about it, we learned how common abuse and rape was. We endured the chaos within our own four walls, not knowing next door the same chaos and pain was being played out. I usually read mysteries for entertainment, which I speak of regularly, but I also read for validation and a type of 'sharing', which I don't always talk about. Despite therapy and decades of moving on, it is only with other survivors I feel truly comfortable. There is a paradigm of reality which cannot be bridged. I am faced regularly with people who think a prayer or some kind of spiritual device fixes everything, that a god or society watches over every bird in the trees of the world. As someone who has buried tortured kittens and puppies, I cannot agree. Generally, I handle it by keeping silent with folks who are innocent of any true knowledge of the effects of long-term and constant parental crime, brutality and abuse, enduring the innocent but stupid and ridiculous babblings of religious and legal pablum. It is similar to speaking with individuals who seem to be unaware they can be injured or die if they jump off of a 100-foot cliff, who confidently explain to you that a god or a lawyer or a policeman or a teacher or a minister will reach out a hand and save you, that you are being silly in thinking any harm can possibly occur or if it does, it can be cured by the power of whatever, or that there will be rewards of personal growth in having suffered, or that if you hadn't wanted it to happen it wouldn't have happened because you would have done something to prevent it. Actually, the fact is sh*t happens, damage occurs, and you either live with it or not. Sometimes there is help, sometimes not. Survival depends on luck and learning to be your own best friend first, but also knowing not everyone is a monster and you can choose positive life-affirming options as time goes on and you grow up. My own biggest remaining issues with what happened, still setting me off into rants today, are people who rely on a god to fix it all or who believe if god didn't fix the problem it must be you are blocking god or it's a mystery of god's divine will, or those who think it happens only when bad people are being bad but it never happens when people are good or Republican Party voters.True story: a mother-in-law, who I'll call Faith, who was extremely religious, and who frightened every child in her family from the age of two with stories about how god saw every thought in their head and every action in the bathroom, told me a story about her own childhood family. She hated her sister because she believed her sister was her father's favorite. Faith believed her sister was an evil whore. Faith believed her sister connived, lied and deceived her way through life, never taking responsibility. When I asked why, she told me her sister used to sit in her father's lap, doing lap dances and acting out sexually to get favors. I don't know why, but it struck me to ask the following question: how old was your sister when you noticed her doing this? Faith spat out, "She was nine years old when I first noticed it. I hope at some point she asked for God's forgiveness." Faith rarely spoke after childhood with her sister, and obviously had never 'forgiven' her. Faith had seven children who felt and feel she was a saint. However, their father, Faith's husband, was a drunken physically abusive monster, who was very successful financially until he drank the money away. To their surviving children, all extremely religious as well, their father was a horror. To me, I think their mother was a horror, too. She never divorced, and she never protected her children except to ask god to protect them. Unfortunately, he never did. But she succeeded in instilling the fear of god in every one of her children, who frequently 'share' with me on Facebook various sayings, truisms and quotations from the Bible. Thankfully, I see they, actual physical beings with actual physical activities in this reality, are physically and actively protecting their children to the best of their ability, education level and financial status. Social awareness, education and female civil rights seems to be making a dent in reducing abusive family life, if not religious faith.For myself, I do not blame 9-year-olds for seducing grown men. But then, I'm not religious. And I'm not aware of any god rescuing nine-year-olds or any children, from any distresses or harms throughout history. I think a lot of stuff happens naturally without people having been instrumental. As far as when people are involved with tragedy: there are good and bad people, ignorant and scared people, wise and educated people, and people who have authority and power, and people who are simply trying to survive. All one can do is increase their odds of survival and success with what they know and possess right now, and hope they end up on the right side of the curve of statistical 'luck' . To those who have somehow survived a disaster or attack, those people who then attribute their survival to a god's rescue, and try to explain patiently to me how The Lord saved them, then it's obvious to me logically that god plays favorites, and I'm left wondering why was that kid or person worthy of saving and not me? I must have been deemed Satan's own at my birth as a newborn. (For the record, I see rescues of people as luck or social intervention, not from an invisible, or visible for that matter, god. However, most people thank a god for their deliverance, no matter who actually saved them. A lot of people need their delusions. What I needed is physical fitness, real people taking the step to intervene, courage, sanity and friends.)I want people to read novels like this because a part of me feels 'if people only knew, they would be more proactive in prevention', which of course, is a foolish hope. A part of me, the experienced part, knows a lot of people do not become more proactive, even if they talk the talk, but instead turn into deniers when actually faced with it, or accuse the victim of playing the part of victim for personal gain. Abusers almost never admit to abusing anyone, so often the truth is only word against word. Defining abuse is an issue. Punishing a child ranges from swats and missing an occasional supper to being beaten for days with belts, fists and feet and eating once a week. Being bad can be swearing or setting the pet on fire. People vary in their responses to abuse, whether it's hearing or seeing abuse. Some people dust themselves off and move on, others collapse into hopeless helpless useless puddles of trauma and drama queendom. Helping oneself is 80% of recovery, and dissolving into angry violence or eternal martyrdom is useless and self-destructive, but no one can predict how any one will react or recover, if they recover. One person can be scarred and psychologically maimed for life seeing another person get slapped, while someone else can be raped from age two to thirteen and find recovery eventually in time, with no one knowing there ever was a bad childhood.Books like this are an answer, a good effective one in my opinion. Reading a dramatic dark mystery by yourself is mostly a nonjudgmental experience, and socially private. You can choose to read it or not. You can choose privately to believe it can happen or not, since it's simply a fictional novel. You can accept it as entertainment or validation or education. You can acquaint yourself further about the topic with facts and information from the Internet or the library, or getting books from a bookstore. You can think about what you would do in similar circumstances, or not. No one will know if you read it, thought about it, or what you thought about it, unless you talk about it. If it is too terrible to contemplate, no one will know about either your lack of courage or belief or if you were triggered. You can privately choose what boundaries to live by, what standards to set, or whether you choose to avoid all mention or thinking about the subject hereafter. You can frame the issue in your mind in any manner you choose.As an aging adult, all I can do is witness and give my opinion. This is a realistic novel about a real problem. I cannot recommend it as a read for everyone, but if the subject of sexual abuse of children interests you and somewhat graphic, but realistic, descriptions do not send you screaming from the room, in denial or horror, then this is a great book to read for both emotional and social depictions of 'what happens'.
An incident in a roller skate rink parking lot results in the death of a young teenager, shot by the local police chief. During the autopsy evidence is discovered that suggests that something far from normal is going on in this small Georgia town. As the police investigate more and more people seem to be involved. The questions are the usual ones: who, what, where, when, why? The answers are what is unusual. There is not a happy ending.I started reading Karin Slaughter books because I wanted to ramp up my tolerance for violence. Might seem like a strange goal but for most of my life I have shied away from books or movies with violence. I wanted to expand my range. I am not looking to totally blunt my violence-ometer but I just want a bit more freedom to move about in the neighborhood of violence and horror. Slaughter seemed like a good exercise to initiate that effort. So here I am at the beginning of a book that seems pretty gross and gory to me and I am reading other GR reviews to see what other reactions have been, looking for words that I might apply to my own reaction to the book because I feel at something of a loss in identifying my mixed reactions. it made me sick to my stomach…unthinkable…this book contains some very graphic and at times almost disturbing material…as gruesome as they come…Where the others are gory, this was horrifying…violent, graphic, and shocking…too much violence and vile acts by the most horrible people…With 7,931 GR ratings as of today, Kisscut scores 4.10 on a five point scale. The first book in this series Blindsighted scored 4.09 with more than twice as many ratings so people who read Slaughter like her writing. Of the dozen reviews I skimmed, there is agreement that it is the character development that makes Slaughter such a well received author. She also gets good comments for storytelling. Kisscut is a story about law enforcement in a small town where people do not know each other as well as you would expect.I guess it should be no surprise that lots of people like horror and violence. But I would still not put myself too firmly in that group. I am interested to see where I fall on the continuum a year from now. And the whole violence issue is a quandary to me. I am never quite sure if I am a pacifist so don’t like violence, or I don’t like violence so am a pacifist. So, you ask, what am I doing reading this book? Good question.There are a couple of things in Kisscut with which I take issue: police brutality and rape. Books that feature police officers in significant roles often raise a moral dilemma for me. In this book (and in many others) the fact that police are often brutal to the “bad guy” in custody or being questioned seems to be condoned or at least expected based on the frequency that brutality occurs. Am I the only one who is bothered by this? How can we respect and support police who use unnecessary or excessive force? Another issue is the apparent fact that police evidently are expected not to report or acknowledge brutality by another officer. Brutality rarely brings on any censure or punishment. The cases of police brutality in the news in the real world happen often enough to suggest that it is a regular occurrence. Maybe there just need to have more women police officers to cut back on police initiated violence. I wonder if that would work?Let me also wonder out loud if Slaughter is not giving some credence to the “women like rape” notion with some of her writing. She knew that there came a point when your mind told you everything was wrong, but your body betrayed you anyway, reaching out for whatever comfort was offered. This is Lena thinking at the end of the book about her kidnapping and torture and rape experience in the first book of the series. This psychology of rape is something I have heard about for some time but have no special knowledge. Some of the online references were to rape fantasies rather than actual criminal rape. The women’s movement and others have hotly disputed the claim of enjoyment. Before Slaughter writes a sentence like the one quoted or places other sexual practices like incest in her writing, she has an obligation to check her facts. In her Acknowledgements at the end of the book she mentions some of her experts in various aspects of the book. There is no acknowledgement for information on rape or incest. That seems like a problem to me. Sexual topics in literature are often controversial and it seems like it would only make sense for the responsible writer to vet information and allusions to those topics. My opinion is that it is inappropriate and misleading to suggest or imply that some women may enjoy rape. Sexuality of the type presented in Kisscut demands some research by the author. There is no claim by the author that any was done.All of this story happens in less than one hot August Georgia week. Hard to believe how many bad guys turn up in such a short time period. How many bad guys can dance on the head of a pin? I believe, not as many as are in this book. There is probably some level of suspension of disbelief in every mystery/crime novel. Kisscut requires great dollops. To the extent that this book deals with child sex trafficking and pedophilia and does some educating on those and other related topics, you might compare Kisscut with the Burke series of Andrew Vachss. But Kisscut manages to cram the aberrant sexual behavior of two (maybe three) Vachss books into this single story. Author Slaughter leaves no slimy stone unturned.I am giving Kisscut three stars because it is a complex plot well put together with many facets explored in significant depth. And as many other reviewers have noted the characters are quite well developed. Doctor Sara Linton, Police Chief Jeffrey Tolliver, and Detective Lena Adams are the primary characters. Each one is well developed. I am withholding a four star rating due to my stated concerns about police brutality, rape and incest being carelessly included with no evidence or claim of background authorial research. Although the book is fiction, I believe the author has a moral obligation to pursue some due diligence in areas that might reasonably be assumed by readers to be accurate.
What do You think about Kisscut (2003)?
The first time I read this, just over a year ago, I had the summer 'flu so I think I missed more than a few key elements. I remember I thought it was confusing and didn't see how the case came together because nothing seemed to add up. A fever and cold medicine will make even the best story seemingly incomprehensible. I am glad that I revisited the novel. The material is still abhorrent, but this is Slaughter and that is both expected and the point. I think what makes Kisscut so different from novels that are about similar cases is the perpetrators are the least likely suspects. At least, they were the first time around; knowing who to look at closely and see how Slaughter weaves clues into their behavior was a good time. I still don't understand why (view spoiler)[Grace didn't put Lacey into the "game" so to speak to make money off of her, since I don't think Grace did it in order to protect Lacey and Lacey seemed to be the "perfect victim" to make them a lot of money. Plus, Grace didn't protect her from Dottie, so I am a little unsure as to why they didn't capitalize on using her for photos, etc. (hide spoiler)]
—Maerhys
4.5/5. This was a tough book to read holy moly. A very dark subject matter. I read book 2 before I read book 1. So I'll have to go back and read the first. I plan on continuing on with the series for sure!
—Tasha-Lynn
Well what can I say about this book. I really enjoyed it but it made me sick to my stomach. Now let me explain, the subject matter of this book was painful and at time sickening to read. Most of this dealt with violence towards children and I couldn't really handle it much before, and now that I am a father it is even harder to read and know that people like this really do exist. I have also thought that I had read and seen some of the most grisly crime scenes ever, but the one at the beginning of this book was hard to deal with as well.Now with all of this said I must give Karin Slaughter credit for writing so well, and having wonderful characters that kept me turning page after page. As tough as the subject matter was I kept reading to find out the next clue as to who was the mastermind behind it all. And when I thought I finally had it figured out it seemed to be so much bigger and more people were involved. This was suspenseful, thrilling and at the same time, made me want to shower when I had to admit to myself that I really enjoyed this book. It is not for the faint of heart and I don't think I will ever be rereading this, but that characters in the series and the suspense kept me picking this up and pushing to the end.
—Chris
