Book Babblings

Cop Town by Karin Slaughter 

The Nitty Gritty: It's Kate Murphy's first day as a beat cop in Atlanta, GA circe 1974. This is not the Chocolate City we all know and love where minorities rule the roost as much as any privileged white dude. No, THIS IS SPARTA! I kid, but this Atlanta is as foreign as Thailand cross-dresser.  Cop Town's Atlanta is brutal, filthy, sexist, racists to the extreme, and cowering under the murderous rampage of a cop killer. Murphy is looking for a balm for her ravaged soul. She is a widow jumping into the work force to take her mind off things.

In Cop Town the police crack heads and ask questions when the suspect stops breathing. So a cop killer it going to be meat for the grinder when the Atlanta PD finally catches up to him. Maggie Lawson follows her uncle and brother onto the force hoping for a way out of her of ironing and cleaning up after her uncle's drunken afternoon booze feasts.

When her brother is almost killed by The Shooter Maggie, with the help of the tag along rookie, Murphy sets out to solve the case. If anyone will bother to take the word of a slit about anything that matters. With the help of the wizened cop Gal Patterson of the plain clothes division Maggie thinks she has what it takes to bring this bastard in.

Opening Line: "Dawn broke over Peachtree Street."

The Good: I'm not one for reading about cop dramas. I watch them on TV and I love them. Law & Order, in all its reincarnations, The Closer, Hawaii Five-Oh, I could go on and on so I figured I would give Cop Town a gander. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the book. Now to be fair it took me a few chapters to get into the book and really enjoy it. The first few chapters of Cop Town were depressing as hell. I had to dose myself with half a pound of chocolate and a pint of ice cream to keep from weeping uncontrollably. I have to tip my hat to Maggie Lawson for not swallowing a bullet when they issued her a gun. Or better yet killing her mother and her uncle and then bathing in their blood. Seriously people kill for less these days and she put up with those two for years. Lawson has an iron constitution that is going to turn her into one hell of a cop one day.

Once Kate falls into the women's locket closet at the APD station the book really gets rolling. Slaughter doesn't give her book the Michael Bay treatment of splashing action across every page just for the sake of the action, which I am eternally grateful for.  Every action scene in her book has a person and a precise reason for being. Which I hate to point out might be because she is a woman. For us gals things have to have a reason, no whether or not its a reason that makes sense to a rational person is up for debate, but there has to be a reason.

The men in Cop Town are deplorable, despicable, devious and delinquent. Ok now I've ran out of mean D words to call them, but I think you get the picture. I don't think Slaughter wrote them as a searing indictment on the male population. I think her intention was to give the rest of the world a look behind the curtain of 'The Man' and I have to say she confirmed what the rest of us have been thinking for years. Those guys are pricks that deserve to be put down. I can't believe that any of them are allowed to carry badges, but then it flows true to form what we black folks think about cops. They are all crooked jerks that sooner shoot you and plant evidence than actually investigate a crime. The few men that weren't totally disgusting still weren't knights in shiny armor. It makes me wonder if Slaughter likes men (that is a joke people), because she sure as hell didn't give any of them any redeeming qualities. Well maybe Jimmy Lawson, but it took the entire book for us to get there.

The women in Cop Town can be just as bad as the men, but for a different reason. They are mean and pushy because the men are, and if any woman has the balls to carry a badge in Atlanta they damn well better be prepared for the flack you  are going to get from your fellow boys in blue. Other than Maggie's mother, the women weren't mean or hateful. They were tough and hardened by life and their circumstances for sure, but any survivor will tell you that armor is the only way to survive a war. And they are in a war ladies and gentlemen. The men of Atlanta aren't just going to sit back and let the women take over. They are going to punish them every chance they get for thinking they are be cops. Slaughter let her female characters be women. But she also let them be badass when the situation called for it. Sure Kate burst into tears on her first day, but she also slugged out a former football player and pulled the trigger when she had to. Even if she still played dress up with her mother's pearls.

The Bad: The overt racism, sexism, physical and psychological abuse that was spewed across the pages of this book was uncomfortable at best. Horrifying in most parts. I'm from the Black Panthers school of hard knocks. When you encounter stupidity in any form you speak up and back yourself up with a loaded gun. I just couldn't imagine remaining silent as men I have to work with groped my breasts or my butt as I tried to walk to my locker room. I cringed every time I saw the word colored. The N-word still stings don't get me wrong, but colored is more insidious than the n-word. That one digs a little deeper for me.

If I rolled my eyes anymore while reading this book they were going to get stuck. I was glad I had my eyedrops handy. The caricatures of everyone and everything in this book was over the top for sure, but it played well. She could have really botched this up, but she masterfully navigated the potholes.

The Atlanta Slaughter wrote makes New York City look like Mayberry. Its hard to think of one of my favorite cities as the churning cesspool in Cop Town. I know she took creative license and I have to tip my hat to her because she did her job beautifully. I could almost smell the burnt heroin permeating my living room.

Final Thoughts: Seeing as this is my first foray into the mind of Karin Slaughter I have to say that I am intrigued to read her other works. Or at least continue with other books if she keeps going with more books in the Cop Town series.