Karin Slaughter is one of my favorite authors and I have been following her characters, Will Trent, a cop with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Dr. Sara Linton the GBI’s coroner for awhile now.  I am always excited to see what Slaughter has is in store for her characters and this book, number ten in her Will Trent Series, was no exception. For those of you who have not read Karin Slaughter, I encourage you to start at the beginning of the series to get the full impact of her style and character development.

Will has a complicated past; an orphan with a learning disability, he has now become a great investigator because of his ability to see through people and understands the ways evil works. Part of his past is his dysfunctional relationship with Angie, a fellow orphan who was also in the system with Will. But now that Will has found Sara and they have become lovers, Will has become more resistant to Angie and her manipulative ways much to Angie’s chagrin and anger.

Our story begins when the body of an ex-cop is found covered in blood in an abandoned building. The blood is not the dead cop’s but is from an unidentified woman who has disappeared from the scene of the crime. Given the amount of blood however, there is a very good chance that if if she is not found quickly she will die as well.  Further complicating this case for Will is that the site where the body was found is owned by a rich, powerful and well connected professional athlete who Will had been investigating for a brutal rape. Despite Will’s best efforts, however, he has been unable to make the case stick and the investigation has stalled.  Needless to say the athlete and his lawyers are hardly in the mood to help the GBI, given this recent history, and the cooperation the GBI gets from them is perfunctory at best. Despite these roadblocks however, Will begins to tease apart the various strands of the complicated crime scene, when suddenly he stumbles onto connections to Angie that he can’t ignore.  As his credibility within the GBI and with Sara begins to crumble, Will stakes his career and the one true thing in his life, his relationship with Sara, to find the truth and to bring a vicious murderer to justice.

Slaughter’s pacing is impeccable with twists and turns in the plot that are unexpected.   But Slaughter’s true gift is her ability to create full dimensional characters with all their flaws and brokenness, who are somehow able to surmount their limitations. Will, in particular, has had to find ways to work around his learning disability and trust issues and Sara has had to recover from the brutal murder of her husband. In this book we see Angie in a new and different way, not just as the disruptive force in Will’s life, but as a resilient, clever woman who will stop at nothing to get what she wants. Making Angie a multi dimensional character was a difficult task, since in prior books Angie has been nothing but spiteful and manipulative, But Slaughter manages to take that background and use it to create a more fully realized character, even if we still cannot quite like her or trust her. I think this is a sign of a great writer; creating a character that we might understand and see as a fully realized person even if we can’t quite like or even identify with them and maybe it was because of that that I found this to be a most satisfying read!

Brenda’s Rating: **** ( 4 out of 5 Stars)

Recommend this book to: Marian and Sharon

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