Unfortunately, though, I just don't think Pieces of Her contained any of the emotion or urgency I would have expected from this author. The story leaps between the present and thirty years ago, revealing a past of murder, scheming and secret identities. Andy makes a number of discoveries that offer up more questions than answers: Who is Laura? What is she hiding? Is someone after them? After that, everything spirals out of control and gets bigger and bigger. He doesn't, and instead Laura quickly and coldly kills him.Ĭaught on camera delivering the killing blow without emotion, first the police, and then Andy, start to ask questions about Laura's past and who she really is. When a shooter opens fire in the cafe, Laura tells him to shoot her next. Laura has recently come out of intense rounds of chemotherapy to treat her breast cancer, while unambitious Andy is struggling to figure out her life plan after a series of failures. The beginning sees Andy and her mother, Laura, going to lunch for Andy's 31st birthday. Rather than a gritty thriller that concentrated on the family dynamics Slaughter seems to do best, we got a strange terrorist backstory that introduced a number of forgettable characters. And the plot seemed a little ludicrous, honestly (though also tamer than expected). Pieces of Her is another slow-paced book about two women - this time a mother and her daughter - but I found the slowness here extremely dull. I really enjoyed her dark gritty The Good Daughter, especially the way she slowly paints in the relationship and backstory between the two female protagonists. Karin Slaughter has been a relatively recent discovery for me.

And if she can’t uncover the secrets hidden there, there may be no future for either one of them. Andrea is on a desperate journey following the breadcrumb trail of her mother’s past. The police want answers and Laura’s innocence is on the line, but she won’t speak to anyone, including her own daughter. But now she’s been exposed, and nothing will ever be the same again. For nearly thirty years she’s been hiding from her previous identity, lying low in the hope that no one would ever find her. Because it turns out that before Laura was Laura, she was someone completely different.

Because we all know our mothers, don’t we?īut all that changes when a trip to the mall explodes into violence and Andrea suddenly sees a completely different side to Laura.

She knows she’s spent her whole life in the small beachside town of Belle Isle she knows she’s never wanted anything more than to live a quiet life as a pillar of the community she knows she’s never kept a secret in her life. ?Īndrea knows everything about her mother, Laura. What if the person you thought you knew best turns out to be someone you never knew at all.

Oliver twist audiobook