This suspense book didn’t work for me at all. PI Frank Quinn and the other detectives should have been more fleshed out. It was hard to care anything about them when I felt like I knew nothing about them. The killer seemed to be the only character with any back story. He was called The Gremlin—a name which hardly evoked fear. He committed crimes of so many different natures that he must have never slept, and the believability factor of the story was stretched too far for me. Instead of being frightening and scary, The Gremlin just came off as annoying. He was constantly wondering about how everything worked and how he needed to disassemble things to find out how they worked. I got so tired of hearing about that and it totally drove me crazy after awhile. The plan at the end to flush out The Gremlin made absolutely no sense and made me wonder if I had skipped over something in the previous chapters. I probably should have just dnf-ed this one. ( )

I can summarize Slaughter very simply - All guts (literally) and no glory. Overall, this is just a mishmash of diabolical killings loosely strung together for no other reason than shock value. Add to that the fact you have so many killings, a killer with obvious deformities/idiosyncrasies, Quinn's group that does no more than mark time and the increasing complexity of the crimes and you loose any semblance of believability. And don't even get me started on the ending which is so grossly over the top, over complicated and over blown that it's comical. I've read all of the Quinn books to date and have enjoyed most but this will definitely be the last. ( )