It's always a challenge to decide what audiobook mystery I'm going to listen to next, but I chose Broken, by Karin Slaughter for a very particular reason - she is a strong and very outspoken advocate for public libraries, making appearances and raising money with her Save the Libraries campaign. She also has, on her website, a link to her excellent op ed piece that recently appeared in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. I felt as if I had an obligation to return the favor and give at least one of her books a try.
I didn't realize it at the time, but Broken is a novel that combines characters from two different series that Slaughter has written, one set in Atlanta and the other set in Grant County, a more rural part of Georgia. The novel takes place in Grant County and begins with the murder of Allison Spooner, a female college student about whom we know relatively little. Although Allison's death was initially regarded as a suicide, Tommy Braham, a local young man with an IQ of about 80, is soon taken into custody by the police where he subsequently confesses to the crime. Not long afterwards, when Tommy turns up dead in his cell with the words "not me" written in blood on the wall, police chief Frank Wallace appears to be a little too eager to write off Tommy's death as a suicide and to close the book on both cases.
There are several other characters who become tangled up in the chain of events. Police officer Lena Adams has her doubts about Tommy's capacity to commit murder; additionally, if his death was in fact a suicide, she bears direct responsibility for it because she did not do a sufficiently thorough job of checking his pockets before locking him in his jail cell. Dr. Sara Linton, the former medical examiner of Grant County who just happens to be back in town visiting her family for Thanksgiving, also gets thrown into the case and the fact that she blames sloppy police work on the part of Lena Adams to be the cause of her husband's death several years ago only complicates matters further. Because of her personal vendetta against Lena, Sara also calls in Will Trent, a special agent from Atlanta, to work on the case. As the story develops, another murder takes place, additional characters (and potential suspects) are introduced and the inevitable sexual tension develops between Sara and Will. As the details of the crime are unraveled, the reader is also educated about the egregious practices of a particular segment of corporate America.
Although I enjoyed the small town setting of Grant County and the attention that Slaughter paid to forensic details, I nonetheless found various aspects of the storyline to be troubling. From the very beginning, Sara Linton's involvement in the case appeared to be a bit of a reach - I found it hard to believe that she would be allowed to perform autopsies in a jurisdiction in which she was no longer employed. An action sequence late in the book that involves Sara and another character turned into a literal cliffhanger and I found myself saying, "give me a break." And when the convoluted back story of the crimes is finally revealed through a deathbed confession, the momentum of the story line comes to a grinding halt as the reader is told rather than shown what happened. I also became confused regarding the identity of a character who was brought into the action late in the story and realized that I probably needed to have read the previous books in the series to better understand what was going on.
Karin Slaughter is a best selling author with a lot of fans, so I was really expecting the story to hold up for me better than it did. However,since I would never consider picking up on a multi-season television drama any place except at the beginning of its run, maybe I need to make a similar rule for myself with regard to mystery series.
I do however want to acknowledge the absolutely virtuouso performance of audiobook narrator Natalie Ross who somehow managed to create a separate aural identity for each of the many characters in this book; she used the most subtle vocal distinctions to differentiate between male and female characters and never missed a beat. It was hard to believe that there weren't at least three or four separate readers doing the voices. I will most likely be checking my library's catalog for other audiobooks that she has narrated.
