Long-time Karin Slaughter fans will gobble up her latest release, The Silent Wife. The thriller continues Slaughter’s melding of two separate series: the Grant County books with medical examiner Sara Linton, and the Will Trent series with—you guessed it—GBI sleuth Will Trent.
My first exposure to Slaughter was through an author interview. Her comments about trying to break into the crime thriller genre in the 1990s struck a chord. As progressive as I thought those decades were, evidently publishers still considered a woman author candidly writing about mutilation, rape, and murder “in poor taste,” despite the successes of her best-selling male cohorts.
Slaughter ignored those stale paradigms with her breakout 2001 novel, Blindsighted. Blown away by both her groundbreaking detail of a heinous murder, and by the quality of her first published novel, I immediately followed the read with her newest effort, The Silent Wife.
Slaughter did not disappoint. Years after the events in Blindsighted, medical examiner Sara Linton teams with Slaughter’s newest protagonist, Will Trent, to investigate a prison riot and subsequent murder. An inmate who has always claimed innocence offers information on both events if Linton and Trent reopen his own murder case. He claims Sara’s dead ex-husband, police chief Will Tolliver, screwed him over years before, sending him to prison while the actual murderer continued murdering young girls.
Slaughter pivots the story between the original murder cases and the present-day investigation, the protagonists searching for a pattern that will identify the killer who remains on the loose.
I’ve only read two Karin Slaughter novels and argue that’s an advantage over long-term Slaughter fans.
First, this book can stand alone outside of the series. Karin Slaughter has written 20 bestsellers that include one or both of our protagonists. I sped through this book and did not once feel that the story was confusing because I’d never read a Will Trent book before. Don’t feel you need to start from the beginning.
Second, I suspect avid Slaughter fans take her storytelling skills for granted. I don’t. She’s got a special talent for character, plot, and gore. Her protagonists leap off the page, pursuing justice while struggling through deep flaws in themselves and their relationship with each other.
“With Will, Sara was keenly aware that she was the only woman on earth who could love him the way that he deserved to be loved.”
The plot is fast-paced, and no suspect gets a pass until the reader rolls into the nail-biting conclusion. The gore is not gratuitous. Slaughter’s depictions of extreme violence show detailed research and she presents the scenes to the reader in a dispassionate, almost medical, manner. I’m not a gore fan, but Slaughter does it right.
Readers looking for similar authors/titles providing the medical/crime thriller vibe that Slaughter has mastered should check out Tess Gerritsen’s Rizzoli and Isles series. You decide—start with her 2001 bestseller, The Surgeon, or the latest release, 2017’s The Bone Garden.
I’ll rate The Silent Wife a 4.5 out of 5 stars. The acid test? I generally read two to three books at once, but when I stumble on a page-turner, the other books go to the back burner. I read The Silent Wife straight through.