Skin Privilege
By Karin Slaughter
Century, HK$198
Karin Slaughter grew up in Georgia, in the southern US, in small towns much like those of the fictional Grant County, the location for her best-selling Grant County series.
These days, Slaughter lives in Atlanta, setting for the recently published Triptych, her first stand-alone thriller. But she continues to draw on her small-town upbringing and the problems that beset those towns - the insidious influence of white supremacists and their involvement in the drugs trade, the explosion in the use of methamphetamine - to perpetuate her popular series.
Skin Privilege, the sixth instalment, features paediatrician Sara Linton, who is also the local coroner, and husband, Jeffrey Tolliver, the sheriff. And for series aficionados now saying, 'No, he's not her husband, they divorced because Sara caught him with another woman,' Skin Privilege opens with Sara and Jeffrey having just remarried and applying to adopt a child.
But it also opens with Sara facing a challenge to her commitment to the town and people to whom she has given so much, forgoing lucrative, high-profile offers to set up a practice. She is faced with a malpractice suit brought by a couple unable to accept the reality of their child's death and looking for a scapegoat and a way to pay their medical bills. Other townsfolk, scenting the chance of easy money, are showing a disturbing willingness to join the hunt.