Laura Cooper has spent her whole life in a quiet seaside town. She is a speech therapist, a pillar of the community and it is here she has raised her daughter Andrea.
Andrea is unsure of herself. She never completed college and she has barely been engaged in any personal relationships. She has returned home from New York to nurse her mother through her breast cancer treatment.
On her 31st birthday, Andrea and her mother are having lunch in a diner when chaos erupts. A shooter enters and kills a mother and daughter before their eyes while sighting Andrea for his next victim.
With a mother’s instinct, Laura puts herself in front of the young man telling him to kill her instead. What follows next is captured on a mobile phone and video footage goes viral showing a composed Laura killing the shooter with his knife whilst suffering serious injuries herself.
What follows that is a series of horrifying events that hint at Laura’s past, bringing plenty of danger to the present. Initially, Andrea heeds her mother’s instruction to move far away and to have no contact ever with either her or her father.
There are two timelines here as Andrea tries to make sense of what she has seen and what she thought she knew about her mother and is thrust down a very dark path. We are taken back to the eighties and discover a whole new Laura and her involvement in a group of anarchists. Andrea’s foray into the past brings danger with it and alone, Andy has to manage to survive it. We see Andy change from a woman who has always reacted to events as they occur, to an independent woman forced to handle this strange new world.
This is a book that is unlike any of the others I have read by Karin Slaughter. I particularly enjoyed the character of Andrea as she grew into this new, independent woman and recommend this book.
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