num_pages: 432
description: A Faint Cold Fear shares many of the characters and preoccupations of Karin Slaughter's earlier books about small-town coroner Sara Linton; she is still caught up in a complicated relationship with her former lover, police chief Jeffery, and disapproval of his sometimes brutal methods. Lena, once Jeffery's most trusted employee, is now a security guard at the local college and coping no better with the murder of her sister and her own abduction and rape. This becomes relevant when Jeffery has to investigate a series of murders on campus and one of the main suspects is Lena's dangerous skinhead lover.Slaughter perhaps relies a little too heavily on a number of continuing story lines, and has constantly to fill new readers in on these characters' personal stories so far. Her principal strength is an absolute ruthlessness with technical detail--she teases out the significance or otherwise of the numerous unpleasant features of, for example, the apparent suicide that is the first of a sequence of suspicious deaths.These are powerful and effective books because they remind us that death, including murder, is never pretty and that those who deal with it have to develop a hardness that is not always sympathetic; at her best, Slaughter has a convincing emotional grittiness. --Roz Kaveney
language: English
title: A Faint Cold Fear
titlecomplete: A Faint Cold Fear (Grant County, #3)
characters: Tess Linton, Ethan Green, Lena Adams, Sara Linton, Chief Jeffrey Tolliver
genres: Audiobook, Crime, Suspense, Thriller, Adult, Mystery Thriller, Fiction, Detective, Contemporary, Mystery
ratings_count: 48804
places: Heartsdale, Georgia
series: Grant County
awards: awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice Award (RT Award)
category: Best Contemporary Mystery
publisher: Gardners Books