Book Review: Triptych

Spoilers!

Karin Slaughter is as confident and bold a writer as I’ve ever read. She is so (rightly) sure of her powers as a writer and storyteller to trust that readers will stick with the journey she’s taking us on. That is no better represented than in her 2007 book, Triptych. This is the book that introduces readers to Will Trent, a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent, taking us out of Slaughter’s Grant County series featuring Sara Linton and Jeffrey Tolliver. I’ve bounced around some, but of the Trent series, I’ve previously read Fractured (the second in the series), and The Last Widow (the ninth book in the series, excluding novellas). Because of Fractured, I did know Angie, Will’s on-and-off-again lifelong love interest, survives her ordeal in Triptych, but it was still intense to read through it!

The reason I said Slaughter is so bold and trusting of the reader is because her introductory Will Trent book doesn’t actually give us Will’s point-of-view until around 120 pages in. Instead, we start out with Michael, a detective with the Atlanta Police Department, who is investigating the grisly murder of a prostitute. Michael, who ends up being the pedophile, serial rapist, and serial killer. We do see Will in this section, but it’s through Michael’s eyes. Then, we switch perspectives to John, the convicted rapist and murderer of a 15-year-old girl when he was also 15-years-old. That is bold storytelling, even if we didn’t know Michael’s true identity yet. Will is brought into Michael’s case to assist because the murder of the prostitute resembles his other cases where the victim’s tongues were bitten off (some of the girls survived). Yuck.

Will is dyslexic and unable to read, and as I critiqued in Fractured, I still find it inconceivable that he would become not just a police officer, but an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation if he was functionally illiterate. Even at the basic level of being able to drive around the city, which comes up in this book! Nevertheless, we also learn of his history growing up in a state children’s home, abused, neglected, and alongside Angie, who was also abused and raped at a young age. They grew up together and became lovers, but Angie bounces in and out of Will’s life on a whim, often hurting him seemingly intentionally. Which is why I didn’t like her in Fractured. What’s frustrating here is, she survives a life-and-death ordeal at the hands of Michael, and you think that will turn her around, but since Fractured was the very next book and I was frustrated with how she treated Will … alas.

John’s innocent. That much seems certain from the get-go, albeit, we’re getting that sense from his point-of-view, but the details just aren’t adding up that he raped and killed a fellow teenager in 1985. Slaughter primarily uses this section of the book to expertly and excruciatingly demonstrate how awful it must be to navigate life after serving time. First, in the most obvious of ways: think about how much day-to-day life has changed over the past 20 years. Imagine getting thrust into it from Point A to Point B, with no transition in between. Secondly, being a convicted felon, and a registered sex offender at that, only makes getting a job, securing housing (where he’s inevitably taken advantage of anyhow), and trying to get by even more difficult. The worst part of John’s story, though, is that he was an innocent man in prison and suffered the inhumanity of rape in prison, repeatedly, and particularly, when he was still a child since Georgia tried him as an adult. No later exoneration and overturning of his conviction or any amount of restitution can change that. That makes his story tragic beyond comprehension, much less that his relationship to his older sister was ruptured on account of his conviction, and his mother, his fiercest defender, died before seeing him freed and/or exonerated.

Michael, as you may have guessed, set up John for the rape and killing. Then, he proceeded to rape and kill his way around Georgia before becoming a cop, where in the Vice unit, he enabled the drug addictions of the prostitutes and raped them as well. Also, at some point, he used the date rape drug to rape Angie, who by the way, is also a cop in Vice. He’s the one who killed the prostitute that set off the book. He raped and mutilated the girls Will’s trying to connect to the previous case. He’s the one who kidnapped the girl, Jasmine, at the subsidized housing location who could have told the police about him. He’s the one who was still trying to frame John for all of this, even after John was released from prison. One of the most shocking twists in the book is when Slaughter reveals that Cynthia, the next door neighbor Michael was having an affair with, is actually a 15-year-old girl. Prior to that point, I wasn’t suspecting Michael as anything other than a sleazy husband. After that, then, obviously, I knew he was the bad guy.

Unfortunately, Will is not quite catching up to all of this, albeit, Angie (and John) seem to be. Will ignores some important red flags, or at least, doesn’t take them seriously enough to prevent the abduction and harm that befalls Angie:

• When Will goes back to the crime scene where the prostitute was murdered, he notices a.) that it’s extremely pristine and clean, and wonders why Michael didn’t note that in his report; b.) he notices that the prostitute’s mail was never recovered, which would have been standard in any competent evidence-gathering operation and useful for notifying next-of-kin; and c.) most significantly, he ignores a blood drop he doesn’t recall being there and the door being unlocked when he returns to the crime scene a second time.
• Angie tells him that word on the street (literally) was that Michael was “having sex” with the prostitutes in Vice and Angie pushed him out, which is how Michael made his way to Homicide. Obviously, rightly, Will classifies this behavior as rape. And yet.
• Michael was the last one to see Jasmine before her disappearance was reported to Will, and Michael even had a scratch on his face he credited to Jasmine!
• Michael’s wife filed a restraining order against him for domestic abuse, which Will learned about, and then had the wife’s battered face corroborated by Angie!
• Will knew about the age difference between Michael and his wife, i.e., that Michael started dating her when she was 15.
• Will also knew that Michael seemed to know about John and yet hadn’t talked to Will about him.

I’m sure there’s other red flags I’m missing, but in summation: Will effed up! He missed a lot, and even with all of that, he was still pursuing John, and only stopped pursuing John when it became abundantly clear that Michael abducted Angie. I still love Will as a character; he’s earnest, humble, dedicated, rule-following (ish), and loves reading despite his reading challenges. He’s also a direct juxtaposition to Michael as someone who certainly faced a more troubling and damaging upbringing, and yet, unlike Michael, didn’t turn out to be a serial rapist and serial killer. (By the way, one of the most detestable characters in the book is actually Michael’s mother, who was instrumental in the frame job in 1985, and even in the present day of the book, was defending Michael’s serial raping and killing. Vile woman.) But I, nevertheless, was frustrated by him ignoring these red flags popping up all around him. Sure, Angie could have been even more forthright and obvious for Will’s benefit, but the warning signs were aplenty.

All of that said, I obviously looked forward to more Will Trent books because they’re written by Slaughter and few are better at this game than she is.