Atlanta, Georgia. Present day.
A young woman is brutally attacked and left for dead. The police investigate but the trail goes cold. Until a chance assignment takes GBI investigator Will Trent to the state penitentiary, and to a prisoner who says he recognizes the MO. The attack looks identical to the one he was accused of eight years earlier. The prisoner’s always insisted that he was innocent, and now he’s sure he has proof. The killer is still out there.
As Will digs into both crimes it becomes clear that he must solve the original case in order to reach the truth. Yet nearly a decade has passed—time for memories to fade, witnesses to vanish, evidence to disappear. And now he needs medical examiner Sara Linton to help him hunt down a ruthless murderer. But when the past and present collide, everything Will values is at stake…
Review:NOT the book for a Karin Slaughter newbie to start with (or an almost-newbie…I did read her very first Grant County book, though I remember more details about the crime than I do about the characters that show up again here). I spent much of the first half trying to keep straight who was whom and when that part of the book was taking place. (It would have been helpful if the audio version had added “x years earlier” or similar to the chapters from the past, just saying “Grant County, Tuesday” and similar didn’t quite cut it for this reader, at least not while I was still trying to keep characters and timelines straight in my head.)
Still, this was one heck of a read, once I really got into it and could keep the Sara and Will storyline straight from the Sara and Jeffrey one. The villain is terrifying, his crimes horrific, and OMG how it all unfolds and he is revealed still has me reeling. Good grief, I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to casually touch my hair in public ever again without thinking of this book…thanks for that, Ms Slaughter.
I don’t know yet if I’ll go back and read all of the books between the first that I read and this one (really not a Jeffrey fan from things revealed here) but chances are excellent I may read the ones that come after–especially after how this one ends!
Rating: 4 stars / A-