This genre-bending collection
proves that not only is Karin Slaughter “one of the best crime novelists in
America” (Washington Post), she’s one of today’s very best writers—period.
From the hallucinatory noir novella “Go Deep” to the twisted short stories
“Necessary Women” and “Remmy Rothstein Toes the Line,” this collection
showcases the New York Times bestselling author’s dark humor, limitless
imagination, and masterly command of voice and character.
Go Deep
Growing up dirt poor,
Charlie Lam worked his ass off to make something of himself, no thanks to his
deadbeat father or his long-suffering mother. And now a lot of people depend on
Charlie: by his last count, sixty-eight employees at his Atlanta auto
dealership, eleven shiftless brothers and sisters, an ungrateful wife, a
spoiled daughter, and a shameless girlfriend. Who could really blame him for
wanting a little extra?
The arrangement is
simple: Charlie picks up a suit from the dry cleaner’s. In the suit pocket is
the name of a very important man. The next day, that man walks into the
dealership, drives out in a new car, and Charlie gets a fat envelope full of
cash. Everyone’s happy. No one gets hurt—so long as Charlie doesn’t cross his
business partner. But with one twist of the knife, the unthinkable happens, and
suddenly Charlie is in deeper trouble than he could have possibly imagined.
Necessary
Women
In a border town between
Georgia and Alabama, in a three-room house made of cement block, a
fourteen-year-old girl watches her mother die. Her father is a long-haul
trucker, away for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. Her mother, with two
menial jobs cleaning restrooms and working nights at the laundry, had been just
thirty.
A week before she died, noticing
her daughter getting attention from a boy, the girl’s mother warned her not to
make the same mistakes she did. Now, her father tells her, she’s the woman of
the house, and she must do all the necessary things the woman must do: the
cleaning, the cooking, the laundry. But there’s a lot more to being a woman
than fixing dinner and doing the wash. Her mother was right: she won’t end up
like her—and she’ll do anything to prove it.
Remmy Rothstein
Toes the Line
As an intrepid
adjudicator of world records, Mindy Patel has met lots of strange people in
lots of strange places. But they’re no match for the Swampers of the Georgia
bayou. Mindy has braved the oppressive August heat in search of Remmy
Rothstein, who they call the “Cajun Jew.” If the photos are indeed accurate,
she might be about to certify Remmy as the world-record holder for longest tongue in the world … and maybe even the widest!
First Mindy meets Remmy’s
half-brother, Buell Rabinowitz, surely the world’s only one-legged, albino,
Jewish African American. Then she makes the acquaintance of Remmy’s mother, a
foul-mouthed old woman with an impressive beard. None of this prepares her for
an eyeful of Remmy: a man who measures up to his singular reputation in ways
that will change the course of Mindy’s life.
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“No one writes like Slaughter…Her words fairly growl on paper, but yet her descriptions of relationships are tear inducing. This may make her an anomaly but she is the best damn anomaly writing books today.”
—
Huffington Post, praise for the author