A daughter’s world forever changed

“If it doesn’t begin, ‘A shot rang out’,” Kingsley Amis once declared, “I don’t want to read it.” Had Amis been patient with Karin Slaughter’s big — and timely — thriller “Pieces of Her,” he would have been well rewarded. The novel’s first line lacks gunfire but whizzing bullets — hailstorms of them — are just over the narrative horizon.

The first five gunshots ring out in a mall restaurant in suburban Savannah, Ga., where a deranged young man murders his girlfriend and her mother. Laura Oliver, a speech therapist, and her 31-year-old daughter, Andy, are enjoying a chatty lunch nearby. Suddenly Laura is out of her chair, dispatching the maniac with a couple of deft moves that leave him on the floor, spouting blood from a fatal neck wound. An astonished Andy wonders, where did that come from? Does she really know her mother at all? As it happens, hardly.

Thanks to a cellphone that has captured the drama, Laura’s face is soon all over CNN. Certain people from her secret past recognize her, and soon Laura is attacked in her home, and Andy is on the run. She knows only her mother has provided her with access to an Alabama storage unit whose mysterious contents should guarantee Andy’s safety. A quest begins for security, yes, but mainly for answers as to who Laura Oliver really is, and, more importantly, once was.

It is not giving too much away — we learn this fairly early in the book — to report that 30 years earlier Laura Oliver, formerly concert pianist prodigy Jane Queller, was a member of a Weather Underground-like anarchist group called the Army of the Changing World. Abused by her tycoon father, young Jane was susceptible to the charms of the group’s charismatic leader, Nick Harp. Jane stuck with this violent group even though she could not stand its other main woman member, who liked to make pronouncements such as, “The concept of right and wrong are patriarchal constructs to control the populace.” One of the acts for which Laura can never quite repent is her involvement in the murder of a corrupt American health-care mogul at a conference in Oslo.

Though the novel lacks some of the twists and surprises Slaughter’s readers have come to expect, and at times feels repetitious and padded, the characters keep you involved all the way, as does the vivid writing.