"TRIPTYCH," by Karin Slaughter, Delacorte, 390 pages, $25
Set in Atlanta, the complex crime novel "Triptych" follows the work of a killer who also engages in chilling acts of mutilation. There are a number of connections to the murders between several people, including police officers. These connections become evident as the story advances.
It is also a collection of three stories in one — thus, the word "triptych" — or in the author's view, three novellas in one.
One story concerns a young man named John Shelley who is convicted of killing and mutilating the body of a young girl he had come to hate; another connects Shelley with Michael Ormewood, a police detective, who grew up with Shelley under another name and who steals Shelley's identify when he goes to prison; the third story is about Angie Polaski, a beautiful vice cop who grew up in an orphans' home with Will Trent, another vice cop, and they are in love with each other but fail to realize it.
All these stories are told using flashbacks, so the reader must be very attentive or he will suddenly lose all control of the stories and how they interact. In many ways, the author has done a good job of connecting the people in each tale as a suspenseful story moves to its climax.
Slaughter also gives a useful and detailed description of dyslexia, from which Will suffers. As a special agent for the state, he operates with great difficulty because he cannot read well. Although he is very smart, he feels the need to hide his problem, causing predictable difficulty.
It's important to know that the narrative is told with as much realism as the author can muster. All the characters, whether police detectives or rapists or prostitutes, regularly speak in strings of obscenities and F-words. Any reader uncomfortable with such language should find another crime novel, most of which do not pose that formidable problem. Delacorte, the publisher of this book, is a division of Random House, which publishes numerous other books of high-quality crime fiction that do not contain filthy language as a hallmark.
Besides the realism desired by the author, the language is blatantly offensive to women and uses offensive slang terms for the genitalia of both sexes in expressions of anger. The author, therefore, is guilty of using women as a sex object, an object of violence and an object of harsh, off-color language. The language is consistent throughout the novel and involves all the characters equally.
The crimes committed here include pedophilia, rape and mutilation, which are bound to be disgusting to many readers. The amount of blood spilled and the graphic description of the killings ranks on a very high level of violence and sex.
If all this can be put out of mind (maybe not), the author has a very serious problem telling her story — it is a question of the author providing so much detail as to be confusing — but it is also the author's inability to construct logical and/or grammatically correct sentences in numerous paragraphs.
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com