Publication: 9th August 2018 by HarperFiction
You’ve known her your whole life…
Andrea Oliver knows everything about her mother Laura. She knows she’s always lived in the small town of Belle Isle; she knows she’s a pillar of the community; she knows she’s never kept a secret in her life.
but she’s hiding something…
Then one day, a trip to the mall explodes into a shocking act of violence and Andy suddenly sees a completely different side to Laura.
and it could destroy you both…
Hours later, Laura is in hospital, her face splashed over the newspapers. But the danger has only just begun. Now, Andy must go on a desperate race to uncover the secrets of her mother’s past. Unless she can, there may be no future for either of them…
You think you really know someone, especially someone as close as your own mother, with whom you’ve been living together for the last three years, until the day everything changes and you see her under a completely different light and you find out that your mother’s life is full of secrets. Every time I read a new Karin Slaughter’s novel I know that I will be surprised, captivated, and completely glued to the page, and, once again, I wasn’t disappointed.
PIECES OF HER starts with what it was supposed to be a normal day at the mall. Andrea is thirty-one years old, she is living in her mother’s garage, working the night shift as a dispatcher, and going through her days with nothing barely exciting going on. She certainly didn’t expect to be snapped out of her monotony during her birthday lunch with her mother, Laura. After a man starts shooting at the mall and another one breaks into her mother’s house and threatens her, Andrea finds herself on the run across the United States while she tries to uncover her mother’s secrets.
Although the novel is slow-paced, the tension is always high. The present narration is interrupted by flashbacks to a past linked somehow to Laura and I found myself completely absorbed in both narratives. While reading about Andrea’s investigation on her mother’s past I couldn’t wait to go back to the story of a naïve young girl who found herself involved in something that she couldn’t control, and vice versa.
Even though I expected some of the twists, I still found myself mesmerised and eager to find out what would happen next. The beautiful writing style of the author makes for an entertaining read and, once again, Karin Slaughter created well-developed characters. At the beginning, I found the character of Andrea often irritating and frustrating, but it was fascinating watching her mature and pull out her surviving (and also investigative) skills and half-way through the book I started really liking her.
PIECES OF HER is a stunning, compulsive, and unusual read that it’s not easy to put down and I’d like to thank HarperCollins for providing me with an early copy of the book.
Book After Book 