Twenty years ago Claire Scott’s eldest sister, Julia, went missing. No one knew where she went – no note, no body. It was a mystery that was never solved and it tore her family apart.

Now another girl has disappeared, with chilling echoes of the past. And it seems that she might not be the only one.

Claire is convinced Julia’s disappearance is linked.

But when she begins to learn the truth about her sister, she is confronted with a shocking discovery, and nothing will ever be the same…

This was my first Karin Slaughter book, and I probably should have researched it more before I picked it up. I was expecting something along the lines of a Lisa Gardener book that I wrote — fast-paced suspense, mildly dark but manageable. This book was definitely dark, but also disturbing and surprisingly slow.

I tried listening to this on audio. I listened long enough to find out the “good guy” wasn’t as good as everyone thought, the police might be corrupt, the sisters discover the truth about their sister, and they identify the REAL bad guy. All of that took TEN HOURS of audio book, and it was still only halfway done! At that point I started read book reviews and summaries, and from what I can tell the next half of the book is the bad guy torturing someone while they good guys try to get to him in time.

In my mind, that’s the climax of the book and should be wrapping up the story, but according to the audio book there was another ten hours of listening in order for that to happen. If the story had been moving at a good pace I might have considered it, but the sister spent a ton of time thinking about the same things over and over again, and there were so many details that didn’t matter (such as describing how to turn on a Tesla).

I might have kept listening through the slow parts, however, if the book hadn’t been so gruesome. Nothing prepared me for the torture porn, rape, and murder. Saying those things wouldn’t be enough to turn me away, but the characters routinely think about it in detail and it’s described again in detail. That’s one of the reasons I stopped reading — in the second half of the book one of the main characters is tortured, so I can only imagine how gruesome those pages will be (maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t want to keep reading and find out I’m right).

I was actually enjoying the book for a while and I think the author set up some really good tension and conflict, but eventually I got to the point where I just didn’t want to invest another ten hours in being disturbed.

If you like Law and Order SVU and wish they’d get more detailed with their descriptions, you’ll probably like this book. Definitely R-rated for violence, language, and sexual content.

Monsieur Perdu calls himself a literary apothecary. From his floating bookstore in a barge on the Seine, he prescribes novels for the hardships of life. Using his intuitive feel for the exact book a reader needs, Perdu mends broken hearts and souls. The only person he can’t seem to heal through literature is himself; he’s still haunted by heartbreak after his great love disappeared. She left him with only a letter, which he has never opened.

After Perdu is finally tempted to read the letter, he hauls anchor and departs on a mission to the south of France, hoping to make peace with his loss and discover the end of the story. Joined by a bestselling but blocked author and a lovelorn Italian chef, Perdu travels along the country’s rivers, dispensing his wisdom and his books, showing that the literary world can take the human soul on a journey to heal itself.

I’m adding this to my did-not-finish list. It’s not a terribly awful book, but it’s not my style. It’s one of those books I classify as too uch poetry and not enough plot.

I like to be able to visualize settings and characters, but I only need a few descriptions to form those mental images — I think the author’s philosophy is the more the merrier. After listening to 2.5 hours of the novel, only one thing really happened, but at that point I just wasn’t interested — I’d essentially listened to Perdu whine for 2.5 hours about a woman who left him more than two decades earlier. It was hard to relate to or sympathize with him.

The slow pace and abundant descriptions just didn’t do it for me. I might pick up the book some time so I can skim through it to see what happens. If you’re a fan of literary fiction, you might enjoy this book.

PG-13/R-rated: I don’t recall much swearing, but the sexual descriptions were more than I’d expected.