by Karin Slaughter
SYNOPSIS 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 recognises 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 GBI Agent, Will Trent and medical examiner, Dr Sara Linton are called in to investigate the murder of an inmate after a prison riot. During this investigation they are offered information about the attack by another prisoner, Daryl Nesbitt. He claims that he is innocent of a series of sexual assaults and murders of which he was convicted eight years ago, accusing former Chief of Police, Jeffery Tolliver and his fellow officers of corruption. He offers them a deal for the information, demanding that they re-open the original investigation into the murders as he believes the real killer is still active.
Opening up the old case pushes Will and Sara's relationship to the limit as Sara must revisit a dark time in her life, and forces her to question her dead husband, Jeffery's original investigation and how he dealt with the case. The details of the brutal attacks combined with their personal ties to the original case begin to take their toll on the whole team, as they come to the realisation that a smart and methodical killer is still stalking women, raping them and then leaving them to die, paralysed in the surrounding woods.
The Silent Wife works really well as a standalone novel, but fans of the series will be happy to know that Jeffrey Tolliver features throughout the story via a series of flashbacks switching between the new and old investigations.
This book addresses sexual assault and violence towards women. It is dark and violent in places with some very detailed descriptions of crime scenes and post-mortems which means that this will not be for everyone. However, for fans of crime thrillers or the other books in the Grant County or Will Trent series, this book is a brilliant addition. Hands down the best thriller I’ve read this year, I can’t fault it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karin Slaughter is one of the world’s most popular and acclaimed storytellers. Published in 120 countries with more than 35 million copies sold across the globe, her 19 novels include the Grant County and Will Trent books, as well as the Edgar-nominated Cop Town and the instant Sunday Times bestselling novels Pretty Girls, The Good Daughter, and Pieces of Her.
The Good Daughter and Cop Town are in development for film and television and Pieces of Her is soon to be an eight-part Netflix adaptation, directed by Lesli Linka Glatter (Mad Men), and produced by Charlotte Stoudt (Homeland) and Bruna Papandrea (Big Little Lies).
Karin is the founder of the Save the Libraries project- a non-profit organisation established to support libraries and library programming. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Thanks to Anne Cater - #RandomThingsTours, @SlaughterKarin and Harper Collins Publishers @FictionPubTeam @HarperCollinsUK for the opportunity to read & review.
Fiction: Thrillers / Suspense / Police Procedural
Product format: Hardback
ISBN: 978-0008303440
Pages: 400 pp
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