Cop Town by Karin Slaughter

[BJ Neary]

Cop Town by Karin Slaughter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Cop Town by Karin Slaughter
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group-Bantam Dell for the ARC, Cop Town by Karin Slaughter, a riveting adult police crime mystery taking place in 1974 in Atlanta, GA. Unwelcome change has been permeating the police force in Atlanta and there are many “old boy” cops who hate seeing women, blacks, and other minorities, infiltrate their ranks. There is a cop killer on the loose and hostility and fear is rampant. The Lawson family is thick in the police force with Uncle Terry, Jimmy, and Maggie as the most current members. With The first cop killing, Eddie Spivey, was rounded up quickly with tangible evidence as the shooter. But Uncle Terry’s manufactured evidence hurts the solid case and the jury frees Eddie Spivey. In separate chapters, the reader follows Wolf (the killer), Maggie Lawson, and Kate Murphy as they fight (against their brothers in arms) to solve the cop murders and affect justice without losing their sense of self and jobs. But the force is corrupt, and as Maggie and Kate push forward to follow the clues, the Atlanta Shooter is calculating his next sick, deliberate “execution,” all the while continuing to be obsessed with rookie, Kate Murphy . Karin Slaughter’s characters are real, deep, and full of contradictions in a tumultuous period of Atlanta’s police force. I particularly enjoyed the depth of the female characters Maggie, Kate, Dehlia, Oma, and Lisbeth. Almost all of the male cops and men were very flawed but this catapulted the storyline forward. As the Atlanta police force grapples with the murders of their own; women in the police force will use their wits to go against the macho police and their good old boy tactics. A superb tour de force, I highly recommend this suspenseful mystery.


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