Book Review: Broken

Spoilers!

Broken people’s brokenness sometimes cuts others, often irrevocably. Nobody in popular fiction writes broken people the way Karin Slaughter does. In 2010’s Broken, a continuation of her Will Trent series, quite literally every major and minor character is broken — heroes, villains, and those in between alike.

Sara Linton, who was a featured character in Slaughter’s previous Grant County series, returns to Grant County to visit with her family, and four years after her husband, Jeffrey Tolliver was killed in the line of duty, she relives what it was like to be without him. Grief never quite leaves, even if it may abate at times. Sara learns that intimately in Broken. But she also learns to find purpose again through working with Will Trent and helping to solve the murder of a local college girl, Allison Spooner.

Will, who is with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, is brought in through Sara’s involvement after the seeming suspect in Allison’s death, Tommy, kills himself in his jail cell. He was a former pediatric patient of Sara’s. (When an inmate is killed in the jail, it necessitates a state investigation.) Worse yet, for Sara especially, is that Lena Adams is involved. Lena, Jeffrey’s former underling, is the person Sara blames for his death. We were teased with their explosive interaction in the prior book, 2009’s Undone. Naturally, Sara, who views Lena like an unchecked tornado, blames Lena for Tommy’s death. Their confrontation seems imminent.

Lena’s boss, the interim chief after Jeffrey’s death, Frank, is an alcoholic, who also seems like a dirty cop. When Allison is killed and then Tommy kills himself, it seems like Frank is doing everything he can to throw Will off the trail of … something. As it turns out, it wasn’t just to throw Will off the trail of him being a bad cop, or an alcoholic who was drinking when trying to apprehend Tommy, or even to cover for some of Lena’s blunders. Instead, he was covering for his criminal nurse daughter, Darla. She killed Allison, then another college student (Allison’s boyfriend), who, along with Tommy, were blackmailing her over a fraudulent drug trial she was running. Darla essentially leaves Lena to die after Lena goes to the clinic unwittingly for help with her hand, and then Darla almost kills Sara before Sara is able to fend Darla off, killing her in self-defense.

Sara and Lena never have their confrontation, at least “on the page,” as it were. Instead, two situations occur. First, Sara learns that Jared, Jeffrey’s son, is dating Lena and she explodes at him. (Jared also has to be at least 15 years younger than Lena.) Secondly, after her near-death encounter with Darla, Sara “let’s Jeffrey go,” and in so doing, most of her rage at Lena. We learn that Sara helps Lena after Will and Jared find her in the basement of the clinic, but that’s the “off page” moment. If there is one critique of Slaughter’s book I can offer it’s that Undone gave us Sara’s return and the surprise about Lena at the end, so, I was fully expecting a full-on interaction and come to Jesus moment between the two women in this book. But they remained on parallel tracks throughout the plot, and then had the “off page” moment at the end. I think both grew through their experiences, with Lena moving on from her self-sabotaging, and Sara moving on from her explosive rage toward Lena, but I needed them to hash it out face-to-face!

Nevertheless, as I said, Slaughter writes broken people extraordinarily well, whether it was the prologue of Allison’s sad life prior to her murder, Will’s continued embarrassment at his dyslexia (and his relationship with Angie, which the book ends with a teaser of sorts that that is continuing), Sara and Lena with their shared Jeffrey grief, and so much more, Slaughter somehow writes brokenness that’s enthralling. Brokenness builds up or tears down, from the floor up or to a new bottom. With Slaughter, brokenness is the puzzle pieces she uses to fit together an intricately plotted, heartfelt story. Bring on more, Slaughter!