Husbands and wives. Mothers and daughters. The past and the future.
Secrets bind them. And secrets can destroy them.
This is book eight in the Will Trent series by Ms Slaughter, which I didn’t know when I picked it up at the library and no idea it was such until I was done and looking it up on Amazon. Even so, I had no trouble following the story (though some reviews on Goodreads indicate that you shouldn’t start with this book); it seemed a self contained novel and I was hooked from the beginning right to the end. It was definitely a book filled with a lot of gore, blood and violence, which is not my usual fare but even so I couldn’t stop reading.
The book starts with a murder scene of a dead woman at an abandoned construction site and another woman who is near death herself, killing someone else with a broken doorknob. This is the scene that Will Trent (an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation) and his partner are called to, and it’s soon clear that the wounded woman is none other than his estranged wife, Angie Polaski. Angie is a cop herself, but she’s always been a wild child. She married Will on a whim, and has been in and out of his life for several years and he can’t quite let her go completely. This has impacted his current relationship with Sara Linton, the medical examiner also on this case. Angie hates seeing Will with Sara, and has even gone so far as to break into their house and steal some of Sara’s personal items. She is one of those characters that seems so over the top at first, you really don’t like her that much. “Angie was a cockroach. She left disease wherever she went and nothing could destroy her.”
Will is a complex guy, and not your usual hero. He and Angie were in the foster care system, and both of them have tortured pasts. He has been on the case of a superstar athlete accused of a brutal rape for a few months, and this murder site is connected to the athlete. How this is all tied together will have to be unraveled before Will loses everything he’s worked for. The first part of the book is shown through his perspective before it switches to Angie’s. In some ways, it reminded me of Gone Girl, but I didn’t hate the characters like I did in that book! Plus this one is much better, in my opinion.
Seen through Angie’s eyes, you begin to understand her motives and how it all came to head in that abandoned building. Even so, she’s still a crazy bitch who has no moral code and you have no idea how she is going to get out of this mess. The action and tension ramp up as the book speeds towards the conclusion, answering a lot of questions that popped up along the way.
Overall, it was a well written book, and again I warn that there is a lot of brutality and carnage. All the characters are damaged in some way, but they are all so very human. The ending does wrap up a lot of things, though one thing was left open for a possible continuation. I don’t know if there is plan for another book, but if there is I will be reading it. I have requested some of her other standalone books, and there are a lot of others in this series, so hopefully I will enjoy them as much as this one.