I picked up this book when I was wandering inside the local bookstore. It was on the new releases table, and looked interesting, lots of positive hype, so I bought the book. I read it fairly quickly, so it's not a slow read. It was, however, a frustrating read.

How to explain without giving spoilers?

Okay, this part isn't a spoiler, since it is on the cover of the book, you know what you're getting into with the cover blurb, but let's take note of it. The protagonist has heard a splash in the water outside of her back-of-the-yacht cabin balcony which is close to the engines. She heard the sound after falling asleep shit-faced-drunk (6 known drinks on an empty stomach, more drinks implied), while still asleep and with the boat engines running. Please note that this is a book with "a churning plot worthy of Agatha Christie"? Did Christie have such a gaping plot hole?

Okay, waving off this issue, let's see the protagonist's response.

I saw two things.

[...]

The second was a realization, and one that made my stomach clench and shift. Whoever had been standing there -- whoever had thrown that body overboard -- could not have missed my stupid headlong dash to the balcony. In all likelihood they'd been standing on the next-door veranda as I dashed onto mine. They would have heard my door crash back. They would probably even have seen my face.
Page 91

Consider that for a moment.

The first thing she saw was a physical item. To be parallel in structure, the second item is also a physical item. I am completely unsure what a realization physically looks like.

But the last part of the paragraph, the heroine is worried that the alleged perpetrator has seen her face.

She is on a boat that is out at sea. She has been assigned cabin 9. There are 20 people on the boat all of whom have been assigned cabins and everyone knows who is in what room. OF COURSE THEY KNOW WHO THE WOMAN IN CABIN 9 IS.

How did an editor let this through?

The book has many of these absurdities in it.

Take the home break-in that happens in the first few pages of the book. The heroine's response:

After he'd gone, I made myself a tea and paced the flat. I felt like Delilah after a tomcat broke in through the cat flap and pissed in the hallway -- she had prowled every room for hours, rubbing herself up against bits of furniture, peeing into corners, reclaiming her space.

I didn't go as far as peeing on the bed, but I felt the same sense of space invaded, a nee to reclaim what had been violated. Violated? said a sarcastic little voice in my head. Puh-lease, you drama queen.

But I did feel violated. My little flat felt ruined -- soiled and unsafe.
Page 11-12

OF F---ING COURSE she'd feel violated, HER HOME WAS JUST ROBBED. That is one of the prime examples of violations, having a place of safety invaded.

How is Ware considered the next Christie if she doesn't understand this fundamental nature of human fear and stress? Being violated leads to feelings of having been violated, pretty basic that.

Ho-boy, and then there is this:

But even if I'd had full-blown psychosis, that didn't detract from the fact that, pills or no pills, I saw what I saw.
Page 141

Well... actually...

She heard what she heard, and imagined the rest.

Yeah, this book was a rough read for me. The details keep pulling me out, and I'm thinking, "Wait, what?"

Speaking of "What?" Too many of them in recent books I've read. Lo had a number of "What?" questions in the book. "What?" becomes annoying as a speech pattern very quickly.

If you're a fan of Ware's writing, you'll likely enjoy this book. This is the first book that I have read by Ware, so likely the last. I'm not a fan.

"What," I demanded, "you don't believe me? You don't think people can be sucked into doing something out of fear, on inability to see any other way out?"
Page 334

I am unsure where or when I picked up this book. I've had it in my pile for a while now, and picked it up when the slower, non-fiction I've been reading was starting to disinterest me. The book was a slower read than I expected it to be, but I'm unsure where my expectations came from.

The book is about Charlie, a lawyer in Small Town, Georgia, and daughter of a defense lawyer, Rusty, who believes that all people deserve a defense, especially those found guilty in the court of public opinion and unlikely to receive a fair trial or vigorous defense otherwise - you know, the lawyer who is guaranteed to make enemies.

Said enemies take out their vengeance on Rusty's family, and there we have the set up for the main character's demeanor, struggle, conflict, strengths, and development.

This is the first Karin Slaughter book I've read. Mom's favorable opinion of Slaughter's writing influenced my reading the book. There were a number of places where I nodded in understanding of some of the characters' actions, so Slaughter's writing is believable and understandable, which is great.

I just don't know that I'm a better person for having read this book.

Stay with me.

Many of the fiction books I've read have a moral to them. If they lack a moral, then they might contain some incident that causes reflection, a pondering, something to consider that affects the reader's life. Take the Imperial Radch series, for example. Leckie writes about privilege and power and how they manifest corruption, all in the framework of a space opera. Heinlein books were all social commentary.

This book, however, I don't feel that. I don't know the lesson, the moral, the point of the book. Yes, "telling a good story" is a sufficient point to a book, but this one didn't leave me with "whoa, that was a good story," or similar thought.

Eh, I don't know. I'd rate this worth reading if you're a fan of Slaughter. Maybe a Slaughter fan can recommend another book written by her that might better showcase her writing?

She knew all the questions on Jeopardy. She knew when to use who or whom. She could not abide misinformation. She disdained organized religion. In social situations, she had the strange habit of spouting obscure facts.
Location 167

I like Gamma already.

"Charlie needs to know that she can depend on you. You have to put that baton firmly in her hand every time, no matter where she is. You find her. Don’t expect her to find you.”
Location 257

She asked, “Whose side are you on?”

“There’s no such thing as sides. There’s just doing the right thing.”

“I hate to blow apart your philosophy, Horatio, but if there’s a right thing then there’s a wrong thing, and as someone with a law degree, I can tell you that stealing the murder weapon from a double homicide, then lying about it to an FBI agent, can land you on the wrong side of a prison cell for a hell of a long time.”
Location 1858

Horrible things were a hell of a lot easier to digest when you took away the emotion.
Location 2214

“I’m not saying anything about how stupid it is to smoke after having two heart attacks and open-heart surgery.”

“That is called paralipsis, or, from the Greek, apophasis,” Rusty informed her. “A rhetorical device by which you add emphasis to a subject by professing to say little or nothing about it.” He was tapping his foot with glee. “Also, a rhetorical relative of irony, whom I believe you went to school with.”
Location 2265

“Charlotte, let me give you the answer.”

“Okay.”

“No, darling. Listen to what I’m saying. Sometimes, even if you know the answer, you’ve got to let the other person take a shot. If they feel wrong all the time, they never get the chance to feel right.”
Location 2312

During the first year of their marriage, one of their biggest arguments had been over Ben’s habit of taking off his socks every night and dropping them on the floor of the bedroom. Charlie had started kicking them under the bed when he wasn’t looking, and one day Ben had realized that he didn’t have any socks left and Charlie had laughed and he had yelled at her and she had yelled back at him and because they were both twenty-five, they had ended up fucking each other on the floor.
Location 2346

I laughed at this. Why? the Underwear Saga, of course.

Charlie washed clothes. Ben folded.
Location 2372

Yep. Good separation of laundry.

Charlie’s shift from supportive spouse to raging harpy had not been gradual. Seemingly overnight, she was no longer capable of compromise. She was no longer able to let things go. Everything Ben did irritated her.
Location 2379

She had always been drawn to people who were delighted by the world, who looked out rather than in.
Location 3254

They had traveled extensively throughout their marriage, Anton taking jobs or Sam attending a conference with the sole purpose of being somewhere new. Dubai. Australia. Brazil. Singapore. Bora Bora.
Location 3270

A massive, reversible toll lane cut through the center of the interstate, catering to all the pickup-driving John Boys who drove down to Atlanta every day to make money, then drove back at night and railed against the godless liberals who lined their pockets and subsidized their utilities, their healthcare, their children’s lunches and their schools.
Location 3500

Sam thought about Melissa, the way she had cried every time she scored less than perfect on a test. That was probably the kind of person you wanted operating on your father.
Location 3703

Rusty remained unmoved. “Death snickers at us all, my dear. The eternal footman will not hold my coat forever.”
Location 3803

She pulled a Ziploc bag from her purse. Her tea sachets were inside. Charlie said, “We have tea here.”

“I like this kind.” Sam dipped the sachet into the water.
Location 3916

I understand this, too.

They might have been magnets, but they were of unequal power. Everything Sam knew, Gamma knew more.
Location 3958

“Do you think I should do it?” Charlie considered her answer before speaking.

“Would the Sam I grew up with do it? Maybe, though not out of any affinity for Rusty. She would be angry the same way I get angry when something isn’t fair."
Location 3965

Charlie lifted her chin. They could be in a western, or a John Hughes movie if John Hughes had ever written about aggrieved, almost middle-aged women.
Location 4186

The Wilsons took the lack of information with a type of resignation that seemed ingrained in their souls. They were clearly part of that forgotten swath of poor, rural people. They were accustomed to waiting for the system to play out, usually not in their favor.
Location 4633

She had so many things wrong with her body that she could not imagine why someone would purposefully damage themselves.
Location 4932

You could only ever see a thing when you were standing outside of it.
Location 5377

“A trial is nothing but a competition to tell the best story. Whoever sways the jury wins the trial."
Location 5410

“I’ve always preferred crazy to stupid. Stupid can break your heart.”
Location 5415

Rusty said, “A father’s job is to love each of his daughters in the way they need to be loved.”
Location 5444

“You’ve always said that everyone deserves a chance.”

“They do, but I don’t have to be the one who gives it to them.”
Location 5451

“What a rapist takes from a woman is her future. The person she is going to become, who she is supposed to be, is gone. In many ways, it’s worse than murder, because he has killed that potential person, eradicated that potential life, yet she still lives and breathes, and has to figure out another way to thrive.” He waved his hand in the air. “Or not, in some cases.”
Location 5454

“Charlotte has always been a pack animal. She doesn’t need to be the leader, but she needs to be in a group. Ben was her group.”
Location 5458

"He’s either involved somehow or he’s an idiot.”

“I told you stupid breaks your heart.”
Location 5479

Her druthers were always to apply logic to a problem, but as with the weather, life existed in a delicate dynamical balance between the fields of mass and motion. In essence, sometimes shit happened.
Location 5782

“I was so relieved when it happened. You don’t realize when you’re that young that you’re going to get older. That there’s going to come a time when you’re not relieved.”
Location 5969

She used the back of her hand to rub her eyes. “I saw Dad do this closing argument once. He talked about how people always obsess about lies. Damn lies. But no one really understands that the real danger is the truth.” She looked up at the white casket. “The truth can rot you from the inside. It doesn’t leave room for anything else.”
Location 6011

“Ben would be happier with someone else.”

“Utter bullshit,” Sam said, her tone clipped. “You have no right to decide on his behalf.”
Location 6281

Of course, she was still pedantic and annoying, but that came with being their mother’s child.
Location 6310

Okay, this is one of the shorter books on my "I have read" list that I don't count as a book, per se. I read it in a dead tree format. It contained words on the pages. The whole object had a cover, title page, copyright, and sections. It qualifies as a book in every legitimate definition of the word.

But it's too short for my book reading count.

This is a printing of David Foster Walace's commencement speech to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. If I had heard it at my college graduation, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have understood it nearly as well as my current day self does. I'm pretty sure if my 21 year old self had understood his words as well as current day self does, my life would have been significantly different.

I'm also pretty sure my 60 year old self will want to smack my current self upside the head, for STILL not understanding these things.

It's a 20 minute read, available in many places online (and in video format, if that's your thing). Worth reading / watching / experiencing.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what the liberal arts mantra of “teaching me how to think” is really supposed to mean: to be just a little less arrogant, to have some “critical awareness” about myself and my certainties… because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
Page 33

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Page 54