Girl, Forgotten

Girl, Forgotten is the second book in the Andrea Oliver series by best-selling American author, Karin Slaughter. On the same day that, much to her mother's dismay, Andrea Oliver graduates as a US Marshal, she agrees to two jobs in her new role: babysitting conservative Federal Court, Judge Esther Vaughn, who has been receiving death threats, is what everyone will see her doing; proving her own biological father guilty of a forty-year-old murder is what she'll be trying to do on the quiet.

In October 1982, seventeen-year-old Emily Vaughn is stunned to discover she's pregnant. She's never been with a boy, or anyone, like that. But the timing fits a party with her clique where she took a tab, and remembers nothing until much later. But would her friends do something like that? Emily's future is suddenly looking very different: goodbye college, respect and a career.

But Emily can't leave it alone: she starts asking questions, and flashes of memory filter in. Her questions get certain people riled up, and she soon discovers who her friends aren't. But it's looking more and more like Clayton Morrow is the father of her baby…

Nicholas Harp, formerly Clayton Morrow, is serving a forty-eight-year sentence for conspiracy to commit acts of domestic terrorism, but due for another parole hearing in six months. Andrea and her mother, Laura have already experienced what this dangerous man is capable of when he escaped two years previous, so pinning something else on him would keep them both safe for longer.

Andrea meets up with her new partner, Deputy Leonard Bible aka Catfish in Longbill Beach, Delaware, and even before she's met the Judge, she has encountered one of the murder victim's closest friends, another acquaintance and her now-forty-year-old daughter and teenaged granddaughter.

From reading the police file on the murder case, Andrea is aware that, while the Police Chief was convinced that Clayton Morrow murdered Emily Vaughn, several others might have reasonably strong motives for committing the crime. And it seems that the surviving main players have stayed close, so when Catfish drags Andrea out to a reported suicide on a fava bean farm, two more potential suspects for Emily's murder rear their ugly heads.

What they find there distracts Andrea from her covert mission: skeletal, anorexic volunteers who seem to be part of a cult. Can they be rescued? And is this in any way related to that forty-year-old murder?

The dual time-line narrative relates events from Andrea's perspective in the present day, and Emily Vaughn's back in 1981-2. Witness statements taken at the time of Emily's death add detail. It's easy enough to believe that those main players are still in and around the small town where they grew up, especially when it becomes apparent how their shiny futures were sabotaged, or circumstances made it advantageous to stay. Grudges, resentments and jealousies have simmered, crystallised, amplified over the intervening years.

Slaughter gives the reader lots of action, and some seriously nasty characters, but also plenty of black humour. Andrea's conversations with her mother, who believes she is safely in Oregon, bring light relief as the tension ramps up, and Catfish is an utter delight, in particular for his teaching moments with a very green dewsum, his dialogue with the police chief, and his own boss. Plenty of scope is left for further books with this excellent cast of characters. Once again, Slaughter does not disappoint.