Review: False Witness

False Witness by Karin Slaughter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m a big Karin Slaughter fan and always look forward to diving into another book from the author. While I prefer her Will Trent series, I do adore the author’s standalone novels in a different way. False Witness, however, left me conflicted.

While I enjoyed this for the most part, it is my least favourite Karin Slaughter full-length novel (the only thing I did not really enjoy were the stories in Three Twisted Stories, but I mostly pretend I did not read that). In fact, there were some points in this one where I thought I would be giving a three-star rating. In the end, despite finding some details predictable, I did enjoy it enough to give a four-star rating. However, unlike other Karin Slaughter books, this was not a solid four-star rating. Mostly it is because I felt the book was slower and did not have the usual twists that the author throws into her stories. It certainly kept me turning the pages and curious about how things would play out, but I did not feel the intense investment that I usually feel. In fact, I felt there were times when the characters were meandering through the events. Alone, this would have lessened my enjoyment, but it may not have had me rating it my least favourite Slaughter read. What pushed it into that category was the constant references to COVID. I know there is a big debate as to whether authors should be including it in their books or not – and I’m not going to get involved in the debate – but I did find it tedious to constantly read about the mask on/mask off/social distancing/isolating/COVID roulette. I know it will not annoy everyone, but it did get to me in the end. I would have understood if it added something to the overall story, but I do not feel like it added much.

All in all, while this was not my favourite book from the author, it was an enjoyable read. I did not hate it, but I did not love it in the way I usually love the author’s work.

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