This one is definitely not a book for the squeamish. There’s blood, guts and post mortems all over the shop and some of it is the type of thing that I need to read with my eyes closed.

Underneath all the icky stuff - because of all the icky stuff - there’s a pretty good story about killings and rapes in small town Georgia (though Georgia’s idea of a small town and mine seem to be different in size, this seemed like a rather large town to me). This is the first in the series and Slaughter (great name for a crime writer I think, she couldn’t have gone in for cozies could she?) introduces an interesting cast. I’m interested to see how many of the main characters play a big role in book two because some of them barely make it out of book one. This is, for a large part, a story based in the characters pasts and I think it’s told very well. For a first book the clues are obscured rather well. I was racing through pages to get past the squeamish stuff and it did help that I wasn’t stopping to think too much about the little details as they came along.

On the whole though it’s a good book, the violence is central to the plot and not just thrown in for effect, I’m looking forward to finding out what happens next.