Book Review: Undone

Spoilers!

Karin Slaughter sure likes her nasty, despicable mother-son duos. In her debut Will Trent story, 2006’s Triptych, a serial killer is aided and abetted by his mother (and is also a police detective). In 2009’s Undone, a similar scenario plays out to a breathless conclusion, this time featuring Faith Mitchell (who was introduced in the 2008 book Fractured) and Sara Linton (yay!), the coroner/pediatrician who was left in tragedy at the conclusion of Slaughter’s Grant County Series in Beyond Reach. Her husband and cop, Jeffrey Tolliver, was blown up in front of her. I’ve been eagerly anticipating reading the book where Slaughter brings her back. I finally have!

Will Trent, the lead character and Georgia Bureau of Investigation detective is still the Will character I’ve come to love in the previous two outings: he’s stoic, understated, grossly insecure, suit-wearing (beling people’s expectation), damaged by his traumatic past, and inexorably linked to Angie, who he’s known since the state’s children’s home, literally this time by marriage. She’s awful, and I can’t wait for Will to extricate himself from her toxicity. Faith, meanwhile, is still curmudgeonly, but she has more justification: she’s become diabetic, and is also pregnant. Sara, who I’m so glad to see back as a follow-up to the shocking events of Beyond Reach as a nice counterbalance to Faith with her empathy and thoughtfulness, has moved to Atlanta, working at the Grady Hospital’s ER, still trying to navigate her grief Naturally, Slaughter is teasing us with Will and Sara. They are both attracted and somewhat taken in by the other, but both think the other wouldn’t find them to be their type. Little do they know!

Anyhow, the thrust of the story is that there is a serial killer on the loose. He’s a nasty character. One of his victim’s, Anna, escaped a cave dug into the woods, and is hit by a car driven by Henry and Judith, two retirees leaving their son, Tom’s, house. Somehow, she miraculously survives the original ordeal and the vehicle crash. Unfortunately, the other woman with her in the cave didn’t survive because she elected to kill herself instead. Anna was put through unthinkable torture, including removal of her 11th rib (religious significance), rape, cuts, forced malnutrition and dehydration, and 11 trash bags shoved up her womb. Get it, the serial killer thinks these women are trash. Ugh. Not only does Anna survive, but Sara, who is treating her, learns she has a child. Will and Faith rescue the child, albeit Will sacrifices some of his good cop vibes by pummeling the doorman of the building.

So, early on, I actually guessed who the killer was, although I didn’t suspect Slaughter would return to the mother-son dynamic. When it was mentioned that Henry traveled a lot, and thus, took his family around different places, I started thinking Tom was the killer. It’s a perfect cover for being a serial killer and confounding the police. We later learn that one of the kidnapped victims, Pauline, is Henry and Judith’s disowned daughter, and Tom’s sister. Tom was already a sociopath at 10-years-old, and would torture Pauline and her friend. Instead of doing anything about it, Judith covered it up (and Henry was aloof, working). She saw Tom as a religious figure who could do no wrong. His real name is Matthias, the apostle who replaced Judas. Fortunately, Pauline escaped and made something of herself, while still remaining vigilant of Tom’s obsession with her (all the victims looked like her).

In the aforementioned breathless ending, Will and Faith miscommunicate and Will goes to Judith’s house and Faith to Tom’s house. Judith stabs Will from behind and intends to kill him until Will’s superior intervenes, shooting her. Faith is attacked by Tom’s complicit (in some respects) wife, but is saved by Pauline who literally chewed her way through chicken wire to escape. Pauline is such a jerk, though, and was willing to kill her fellow captive, if it meant she survived and escaped. She also kept calling Faith a “bitch.”

In addition to obviously the horrific behavior and actions of Tom, Judith, and Tom’s wife, the other villain of this story is the local county police. Instead of helping Will and Faith solve the case, they a.) have ego problems with the GBI “taking over” their case; and b.) are covering their butts because of their slow response time to the original crash where Tom was on the scene! That’s vital information, and Tom lied by omission about being on the scene. It’s flabbergasting to me that police officers would act like that when there is a serial killer on the loose. In hindsight, I’m wondering about the vehicle crash with Henry, Judith, and Anna. There is some discussion with Pauline about how much their father knew, and it doesn’t seem like he knew much. But it is awfully convenient that the parents crashed into one of Tom’s escaped victims. The counter argument is that the cave was nearby Tom’s actual home, which Henry and Judith were leaving.

The two positives of this horrific serial killer case are that getting back involved and feeling useful helps Sara emerge into a new, more productive reality with her grief, and I think Will and Faith get to a better understanding with their partnership. They trust each other more.

Finally, in the Epilogue, Slaughter reveals who wrote the letter to Sara about Tolliver’s death, which she carried around with her for years but didn’t want to read. Lena Adams! Tolliver’s partner. Shockingly (to me), Sara blames Lena for Tolliver’s death. Even though she didn’t murder Tolliver, she might as well have in Sara’s estimation. I need to see Sara’s reasoning flushed out more. Yes, Tolliver felt he had to take care of Adams, including against her ex-boyfriend, who was a Nazi, but that still seems awfully unfair to blame the unfurling of those events that caused Tolliver’s death on Adams. We shall see!