We Are All Guilty Here - Karin Slaughter

"Welcome to North Falls—a small town where everyone knows everyone. Or so they think.

Until the night of the fireworks. When two teenage girls vanish, and the town ignites.

For Officer Emmy Clifton, it’s personal. She turned away when her best friend's daughter needed help—and now she must bring her home.

But as Emmy combs through the puzzle the girls left behind, she realizes she never really knew them. Nobody did.

Every teenage girl has secrets. But who would kill for them? And what else is the town hiding?"

What Worked for Me:

Just about everything, if I'm being honest. I was a bit hesitant to pick up a 400+ page police procedural read as I find sometimes they can get really slow or repetitive with the investigation elements.  However, I was hooked from pretty much page 1 until the very end.

I loved the character work in this - each of the characters was really well developed and felt like a real person.  I think Slaughter does a great job of really finding the humanity in her characters, even the bad guys, which makes for a very compelling read.  As this is a small town setting, there are a lot of side characters, many of whom are interviewed during the investigation.  Slaughter has such a good writing style for my brain that I was never confused about who was who or how they were connected to the investigation.  While this is only the second Karin Slaughter book I've read, her character development has stood out in both of the reads so I'm looking forward to reading more of her backlist. 

The investigation was really well plotted and I enjoyed that we had so many different suspects and theories during the investigation.  The final solution was not one that I saw coming (I had a very different theory while I was reading) but I think all the pieces fit together perfectly.  There were a few times during the book where the characters would sit down and sort of re-go over the details of the crimes, trying to look at them from different angles or figure out where a new piece of information fit.  This happened just enough to be helpful reminders to the reader but not enough to feel overly hand-holdy.  I really enjoyed that once they did find the solution to the mystery, we got a really detailed recap of the events and how they transpired so we could see what really happened which helped to fill in some gaps. 

What Didn't Work for Me:

There is a pretty significant time jump in this book (12 years), which I didn't mind, but found the character details after the jump to be a little jarring.  Obviously people can change a lot over 12 years, but Slaughter would drop in new character details in such a way that it felt like I should have already known them was a little odd.  It makes sense because the characters we are following would already know these details, but the way they would just be dropped casually into conversations had me doing a few double read overs to make sure I actually read that right.  

Overall, this was a great read that balanced an interesting investigation plot with some really dark details.  It read like a really good episode of a TV crime drama and I was hooked the whole way through.  This is listed as the first book in the North Falls series so I look forward to reading the next book in the series as well as Slaughter's backlist.