Beyond Reach by Karin SlaughterBeyond Reach by Karin Slaugh­ter, July 31, 2007 release. Avail­able for­mats include hard­cover, audio CD and cas­sette and ebook. Beyond Reach is the 6th book in the pop­u­lar Grant County series fea­tur­ing Dr. Sara Lin­ton, pedi­a­tri­cian and part-time coro­ner set in a fic­tional town out­side Atlanta, Georgia.

The story opens with a taunt ten­sion and a vio­lent death. The reader is offered a glimpse into a seri­ous sit­u­a­tion that is about to go down and only has one omi­nous end­ing and that Lena is involved.  Flash for­ward to the present, Jef­frey and Sara learn that Lena has been arrested in a small town out­side Grant County and is held as a per­son of inter­est. There was a dead body found at the scene and Lena may or may not have been involved.  So Sara and Jef­frey travel from Grant County to Reese, Geor­gia in hopes of help­ing Lena untan­gle her­self from what­ever prob­lems she is fac­ing within this small rural town.

Before Lena’s trouble’s inter­fered, Sara Lin­ton had been fac­ing a nasty mal­prac­tice suit. She is being sued by a par­ent for delay­ing ther­apy for their ter­mi­nally ill child. Sara’s wor­ried that her insur­ance car­rier will cave and pay the fam­ily thereby paint­ing her as a neg­li­gent doc­tor. The law­suit has far reach­ing effects in the com­mu­nity. Most of the res­i­dents of Hearts­dale shun or avoid Sara and there­fore Sara has closed her clinic pend­ing the out­come of the law­suit. How­ever, Lena’s trou­bles are now front and cen­ter and this pro­vides Sara with a tem­po­rary dis­trac­tion from her own problems.

The author does an excel­lent job going back and forth between the present and past to bring the two threads together for the cli­max of the story. Alas, I was com­pletely unpre­pared for the unex­pected plot twist for this story, too. As usual, Beyond Reach was a sus­pense­ful story, well plot­ted with the high­light for me being the con­tin­ued devel­op­ment of Jef­fery and Sara’s rela­tion­ship. Of course Sara doesn’t care for Jef­fery gal­lop­ing to Lena’s res­cue but they both stay in Reese and fig­ure out what’s going on. In Lena’s usual fash­ion she dis­tances her­self from the very peo­ple who want to help her by using them to help her escape and elude the author­i­ties. This causes fric­tion ini­tially between Jef­frey and the local sheriff.

We learn that Lena was on vacation, checking on her uncle, Hank Nor­ton, a for­mer drug addict who raised Lena and her twin sis­ter, Sybil. Lena learns that he recently fell off the wagon and started using again. Lena decides to check around and talk to the local folks to find out what trig­gered his relapse. Mean­while, Jef­frey learns that some skin­heads have inun­dated the small rural town with metham­phet­a­mine. The local sher­iff seems elu­sive and laid back despite the recent increase in crime. There are quite a few red her­rings the author throws around. How­ever,  Jef­frey does get to the bot­tom of the prob­lems that Lena is faced with that leads to a very unex­pected plot twist to the story. 

As a reader who was emo­tion­ally as well as finan­cially invested in this series I must state that I am dis­ap­pointed that Ms. Slaugh­ter has decided to go in a direc­tion I find some­what vex­ing. Just to recap and this infor­ma­tion may be spoil­ers for those who’ve never read this series: through­out this series we’ve had to deal with Sara’s pain from her bru­tal rape that has resulted in her inabil­ity to have chil­dren. We watched rekin­dle her rela­tion­ship with her phi­lan­der­ing ex-husband, Jef­frey Tol­liver, who cheated on her but ulti­mately regains her trust.

We’ve had to endure Lena’s self-destructive per­son­al­ity and her lengthy recov­ery from being a vic­tim of a rape and deal­ing with the mur­der of her twin sis­ter. I’ve had to sus­pend dis­be­lief for and stom­ach a lot of the vio­lence in such a small town with a high body count. Grant County has had its share of vio­lent crimes that con­sisted of rape, incest and mur­der from perps who some­times remain elu­sive from the law. I could accept the end­ings of most of her books that ended with jus­tice never ful­filled because it is a real­is­tic outcome.

So much dark­ness and sad­ness with only very lit­tle hap­pi­ness as it seems to me that as read­ers we’re left deal­ing with one tragedy after another. Was there any light in this series? I’d like to think so with Sara and Jeffrey’s rela­tion­ship because that was the one thing that anchored me to this series that has been con­sis­tently dark and bru­tally vio­lent. How much more trial and tribu­la­tion must the char­ac­ters and the read­ers endure? Alas, as sus­pense­ful and well writ­ten as this novel was for me, I’m unde­cided if I would want to con­tinue forth. The path that Ms. Slaugh­ter has decided to go seems to be more of the same. Alas, I hope she meets the chal­lenges she’s set forth for her and this series and wish her con­tin­ued success.

In the end, <a href=“a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Reach-Karin-Slaughter/dp/038533947X/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203175624&sr=8–1″>Beyond Reach was a cap­ti­vat­ing read for me despite the end­ing. I’ve had sev­eral days of review­ing my feel­ings about this book to accept the con­clu­sion but I strongly dis­agree with it. Over­all, I will give this book the B+ it deserves for the cap­ti­vat­ing, page turn­ing, taunt sus­pense novel that it is for me and an F for the emo­tional manip­u­la­tion you have forced your loyal read­er­ship to endure. I hope that it was worth it.

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