What I’m Reading This Week: Karin Slaughter’s ‘Blindsighted’. When I was a few chapters into this book, I started to wonder whether the author’s surname, Slaughter, was a pen name, chosen because she was writing a particularly gruesome series of murders. I won’t go into all the details, but the first murder involved abuses of the victim’s body in a way I had not imaged ever happening. A short Google showed that Slaughter is in fact her real name. “I guessed I lucked out on that,” she said. Some of the material is based on research she did on real serial killers like Ted Bundy.  If she had been writing romances she would have had to change her surname. The book is well written, fast paced, the characters are believable, and it’s well researched. The conflicts that go on in a small town police department and medical examiner’s office, where everybody is friends with, or is related to, or an ex-partner of other characters in the book gives it an extra layer of emotional complexity that might be absent in big-city crime stories. It’s a good read, but only for those with a strong stomach.