'The Last Widow' Will Trent #9 by Karin Slaughter

From the BLURB:

The routine of a family shopping trip is shattered when Michelle Spivey is snatched as she leaves the mall with her young daughter. The police search for her, her partner pleads for her release, but it's as if she disappeared into thin air.

A month later, on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, medical examiner Sara Linton is at lunch with her boyfriend Will Trent, an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. But the serenity of the summer's day is broken by the wail of sirens.

Sara and Will are trained to run towards an emergency, not away from it. But on this one terrible day that instinct betrays them. Within hours the situation has spiralled out of control. And the fallout will lead them into the Appalachian mountains, to the terrible truth about really happened to Michelle, and to a remote compound where a radical group has murder in mind ...

‘The Last Widow’ is the ninth book in Karin Slaughter’s ongoing crime-thriller series, ‘Will Trent’.

It has been three years since we got a new ‘Will Trent’ instalment – and truth be told, last book ‘The Kept Woman’ didn’t quite tide me over satisfactorily. It read like a filler-book in the series, with little progress or advancement for the characters and their relationships – which is the whole reason I keep coming back to Slaughter, for the relationship of Will Trent and ‘Grant County’ expat, Sara Linton.

Well, I am happy to report that ‘The Last Widow’ left me a lot more satisfied – but also built my hunger and renewed my interest in this series overall, to the point where I know that I’m going to be painfully desperate for the tenth book  – which will probably be another three years coming!

Slaughter is very clever in how she sets up the parameters of this story – which hinges on an upcoming catastrophic event that none of our players know precisely what it is, only that it’s coming. There’s a countdown that the timeline hinges on, and from the get-go Slaughter uses it to set up the personal fractions and factions within the series world too.

We see a small window of time from both Sara and Will’s perspectives – the calm before the story – as they respectively deal with nuances in their relationship within an ordinary day. What’s brilliant is that we get the internals from both of them and see the same scene play out from both their perspectives – to realise that Will and Sara are currently out-of-step in their relationship, without even realising it. This is characterisation minutiae, and it’s Slaughter at her absolute best – because these small details will echo throughout the book, until they become loud as church-bells by the end.

From there, the book picks up a frenetic pace and a chilling whodunit – the crux of which I don’t want to give too much away, because it’s a great premise and plot for the entire book. You’d think a storyline like this when Will and Sara are on rocky ground, would further fracture them for readers but it actually does the opposite – solidifying their relationship, and what’s to come in the series.

I’ll only say that ‘The Last Widow’ is a book of the times. Slaughter has done her research – as always – but in doing so she’s looked into the dark-heart of the current American political and social climate, and it’s nor pretty. This book deals with Neo-Nazi’s, domestic terrorism and homebred militia. It’s honestly one of the most frightening scenarios and back-stories Slaughter has hit on in recently memory, for the very fact that it feels uncomfortable contemporary;

From what Faith could tell, most of the men were just looking for a reason to camp out, get away from their wives, and pretend they were more important than their actual lives as accountants or used car salesman would indicate. The more dangerous factions were steeped in the theories of the Posse Comitatus, who believed that the government should be violently overthrown and returned to white Christian men.
Apparently, they lacked access to photographs of the majority of the United States Congress, the president, the cabinet, and most of the judges packed onto state and federal courts.

Amidst all this are Sara and Will, caught up in these factions with far-right extremists – though I won’t say how. I will however, say that what Slaughter illuminates on the true-background of such groups is terrifying. And it essentially boils down to; war breeds home-grown terrorists. There is a direct correlation, in fact, between white nationalist domestic terrorists and those with US military-backgrounds; men who come home from war feeling disenfranchised, broken, and discarded by their government – who have seen up close how grassroots terrorist organisations work from their fighting abroad, then apply those “lessons” to their own disillusionment and anger. And the fact that the US Government knows about this correlation – a comprehensive report was gathered in 2009, but “conservative politicians and media outlets jumped on the report,” the backlash was so severe DHS publicly apologized for the report and dismantled the team responsible for tracking far-right threats.

This is the breeding ground for bad-guys in ‘The Last Widow’, and it sees Sara go toe-to-toe with a Neo-Nazi militiaman;

She asked, “You ever notice how George Clooney never goes around telling people how handsome he is?”
Dash raised his eyebrows, expectant.
“It makes me curious – if you’re really a patriot, do you have to put it in your name?”
Dash chuckled, shaking his head. “I wonder, Dr. Earnshaw, if I was a writer, how would I descrive you in a book?”
Sara had read books by men like Dash. He would list the colour of her hair, the size of her breasts and the shape of her ass.

There are so many little asides throughout this book, when Slaughter absolutely goes to town on the likes of khaki-clad Charlottesville Nazis, and media pundits who think racism should be given parity. It’s delicious, sinister, sometimes overwhelming but so very accurate as to be remarkable. This is Slaughter at the top of her game – taking the real world and distorting it with just enough truth to make the crime-thriller notes that most more astute.

‘The Last Widow’ was an absolute thrill from beginning to end – but the characterisations within are also bang on, and the best they’ve been in the ‘Will Trent’ series for a while now (certainly since Sara and Will solidified their romantic relationship.)

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This is Karin Slaughter at her very best, and I just want more.

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'The Kept Woman' Will Trent #8 by Karin Slaughter

From the BLURB:

A body is discovered in an empty Atlanta warehouse. It's the body of an ex-cop, and from the moment Special Agent Will Trent walks in he knows this could be the most devastating case of his career. Bloody footprints leading away from the scene reveal that another victim - a woman - has left the scene and vanished into thin air. And, worst of all, the warehouse belongs to the city's biggest, most politically-connected, most high-profile athlete - a local hero protected by the world's most expensive lawyers. A local hero Will has spent the last six months investigating on a brutal rape charge.

But for Will - and also for Dr Sara Linton, the GBI's newest medical examiner - the case is about to get even worse. Because an unexpected discovery at the scene reveals a personal link to Will's troubled past. The consequences will wreak havoc on his life and the lives of those he loves, those he works with, and those he pursues.

But Sara's scene-of-the-crime diagnosis is that they only have a few hours to find the missing woman before she bleeds out . . .

‘The Kept Woman’ is the eighth book in Karin Slaughter’s addictive crime series, about Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) officer, ‘Will Trent’.

This book follows on from the seventh, ‘Unseen’ in which Will and his girlfriend Sara Linton went through the fallout of a tough investigation, only to come out stronger and more committed in their relationship. Sara is the doctor/medical examiner from Slaughter’s original ‘Grant County’ series, and she’s the widow of that series’ protagonist, Jeffrey Tolliver. But Sara’s past and grief over Jeffrey has really been the smallest hurdle in her and Will’s new relationship – namely because Will is actually married, to his long-time friend and psychological torturer, Angie Polaski.

Will and Angie met as children in the crooked foster-care system; they suffered through extraordinary abuse at the hands of various foster parents and fellow children. Will and Angie both went on to become cops – Angie a bad cop, and Will as in all things, one of the good guys. Angie has been Will’s longest and steadfast friend, but she’s also his torturer – she knows all his weak spots, and she exploits them for her own gains in their twisted relationship. And Angie’s been working overtime lately, since Will and Sara started dating some eighteen months ago …

But when this book kicks off, it’s at a murder scene with at least two missing bodies – one of which has all signs pointing to Angie Polaski – thus forcing Will to confront the very idea he’s been secretly harbouring for most of his life; that his wife might really be dead, and out of his life for good.

Ok. So. I love Karin Slaughter and my love is well-documented. The last ‘Will Trent’ book we got was in 2013, so I have been ridiculously excited for ‘The Kept Woman’ – especially after Slaughter revealed early on that this book would feature the mysterious and merciless, Angie. And while I was reading I really was like a pig in muck; enjoying every second of this world and Slaughter’s writing that I’d been sorely missing for three years. But, but, but … when I got to the end, I really did have a moment of reflection on how this book impacts the characters overall going forward – and I came to the realisation that it really doesn’t. ‘The Kept Woman’ doesn’t change much of anything for the characters – and there was more emotional upheaval at the end of ‘Unseen’. That means ‘The Kept Woman’ has the tinge of a “filler-book” for me; with a lot of bells and whistles happening in the plot to make us feel like we’re moving toward some horrible, inevitable tilting, but by the end not a lot changes. Everything pretty much stays the same for the players in this game.

On the one hand – maybe maintaining a status-quo might be okay for the eighth book in a series (especially when we don’t know exactly how many books Slaughter has planned in this series? We may be only at the mid-way point?!) Sara Linton migrating from ‘Grant County’ to ‘Will Trent’ was a big shake-up of its own early on, and then her falling for Will was a huge development for both characters. But I do get worried when Slaughter keeps her characters (and readers) in a semi-decent stagnant space by the end of a book. We all know what happened in ‘Beyond Reach’ once Jeffrey and Sara reached that point, right?

So – yes – on the one hand ‘The Kept Woman’ let me down a little bit, because nothing really changes. Even some pretty big revelations that come to the surface won’t actually impact characters too much going forward … And it’s always a little sucky to get to the end of a 548-page book and think “Huh, we’re exactly where we started.”

But what I did admire in this book was Slaughter examining rape and sexual assault cases through the lens of media and stardom. There’s a case that Will has been working in this book, about an NBA star who is accused of violently raping and beating a drugged woman – Will was the lead investigator, taking the case through to trial … where he discovered his client’s background trashed the jury’s perception of her, witnesses were paid off or intimidated, and the whole thing fell apart. And all because the accused rapist – Marcus Rippy – is a multi-million dollar cash-cow for his sports agency.

Rippy’s case allows Slaughter to make some uncomfortable truths and shine a harsh light on how such cases play out in the glare of media spotlight and the ruthless court of public appeal. And what’s even more unsettling is how much the Rippy rape case mirrors real examples – like Kobe Bryant’s 2003 rape case, that established a new and nasty legacy for women trying to report against powerful and moneyed men. Even see what’s been happening to Amber Heard after she reported Johnny Depp for domestic violence abuse – a single photo appears of her smiling(HOW DARE SHE?!) and suddenly people think it’s an open and shut case of a gold-digger versus a rich megastar. Slaughter really goes to town on these notions, and it’s both nauseating and eye-opening;

Will didn’t respond, because there was nothing else to say. 

Faith gripped the steering wheel. ‘I have rape cases. You don’t throw a murder case to a jury and they ask, “Well, was the guy really murdered or is he lying because he wants the attention? And what was he doing in that part of town? And why was he drinking? And what about all those murderers he dated before?”’ 

‘She wasn’t sympathetic.’ Will hated that this even mattered. ‘Her family’s a mess. Single mom with a drug habit. No idea who the dad is. She had some drug issues in high school, a history of self-cutting. She was coming off academic probation at her college. She dated around, spent a lot of time on Tinder and OkCupid, like everybody her age. Rippy’s people found out she had an abortion a few years ago. She basically wrote their trial strategy for them.’

One more reason why ‘The Kept Woman’ didn’t sit overly well with me was that Sara Linton didn’t read … like herself in this book? She’s very much in a back-seat role, which I didn’t appreciate – but also her reactions felt, off? I know lots of people read ‘Grant County’ and now ‘Will Trent’ and thoroughly dislike Sara Linton. I’ve read it said that she’s a bit of a Mary Sue. I never felt that way – but in this book I did find her getting on my nerves, especially when Will’s life is being thrown off-kilter and he’s experiencing intense grief and Sara pretty much just wants him to get over it because Angie was a terrible human-being and he has her now. Yeah, there was just something tonally off about Sara and her reactions in this book? Also that she was relegated to the periphery.

I love Karin Slaughter, and while reading ‘The Kept Woman’ I did enjoy the ride. But upon reflection this books feels … stagnate. In a series where there’s been so many twists, turns and shake-ups, you really notice when one book makes a big show-and-dance about not actually advancing the story and players. It just sucks that I’ll probably be waiting another three years for the next instalment, and living in hope that these characters I’ve grown to love start marching forward with a bit more determination.

3/5

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