Book Review: Criminal

Spoilers!

In a patriarchal, white world, women and people of color have had to navigate those spaces not meant for them with a certain level of newfound aplomb, or if it was their way (no shame in it), deference to get by. Fortunately, we live in a world now dealing with the vestiges of such systemic power dynamics rather than their full robustness. But we’re not that far removed from it, either. Within my parents’ lifetime, women still needed their husband’s (or father’s) permission to take out a mortgage or receive credit card approval (1974). Women and Black men and women were just starting to integrate into predominately white male spaces, like our police forces (also the 1970s; while there had been female and Black police officers before, it wasn’t common, full-time practice until then). All of this makes for a sweltering, combustible backdrop for Karin Slaughter’s 2012 book, Criminal, about women breaking through the glass ceiling in their pantyhose and the killers and men who wish they hadn’t. In her Acknowledgements, Slaughter details much of my preamble and the research she dove into to create such context for her book. I always think it’s neat when popular fiction authors do a lot of research for their books because it belies popular (heh) perceptions.

Criminal is the sixth book in the Will Trent series, and Slaughter is not done expanding the known Will Trent universe; she has a lot of tales up her sleeve, and this might be her most impressive, harrowing yet. Like the previous Trent books, the main characters we are following are not actually Trent himself, but they are uncovering details that pertain to Trent, nonetheless. The book goes back and forth between 1975 Atlanta and the present day. In 1975, we follow Amanda Wagner and Evelyn Mitchell as newly minted police officers looking to “break the glass” at the Atlanta Police Department. We know from the Trent series that Wagner is Trent’s hardnosed, often cruel boss, and Evelyn is the mother of Faith Mitchell, his partner. But in 1975, Wagner was not hardnosed at all; she was more of a brownnoser to her father, also on the Atlanta Police Department, albeit recently fired to make room for desegregation. She was hesitant and unsure of herself. It was Mitchell, who was much more freewheeling, who opened her up and encouraged Wagner to be more daring as a police officer.

The male police officers on the Atlanta Police Department are crude to Wagner and Mitchell, to the point of sexual harassment, but that’s merely the surface issue. The other issue is that the male police officers aren’t good at their job. They are drunkards and negligent, who use fisticuffs and threats to ensure convictions rather than following the evidence. And of course, they are misogynists and racists, the latter stemming from not-long-ago pledges to the Ku Klux Klan. It takes Wagner and Mitchell, who are vested in actually working a real homicide and a slew of missing person cases, even if those missing persons are prostitutes, to catch the real wrongdoers. They have to put up with all kinds of hogwash from their superiors, peers, and the community itself to do it. As Slaughter notes in the book and as a fact of real life in 1975, women in the community would report female police officers as car thieves because they couldn’t imagine female police officers existing.

How all of this connects to Trent is that one of the prostitutes, Lucy, was from a well-to-do family, with an older brother imminently graduating from law school. While in captivity at the hands of a serial killer, he impregnates her. Lucy is able to free herself long enough from her bonds to hide the baby from the killer in a kitchen trashcan. That baby is Will. So, his father is a serial killer, who killed to “bring Godliness” to the prostitutes, and his mother was a drug-addicted prostitute who was murdered … by said father. Trent’s obviously messed up by all of that and it doesn’t help that his still-sort-of-wife Angie, who is psychologically and physically abusive to him, uses that to further degrade him. All while Trent is trying to make it work with Sara Linton after they initially hit it off in the previous book, Fallen, set only two weeks prior to the events of this book. While Trent is showing Linton his childhood foster home, Wagner barrels into the home with a hammer hellbent on searching for something. Before she can, though, the old stairs give way and she falls into the basement. Later, Trent will use the same hammer to break away through the walls and the brick floor to find whatever Wagner was searching for. But I was screaming in my head; Will! She was using the stairs to get to where the item was; she only happened to fall into the basement! Why are you looking in the basement?! But again, to be fair to Trent, he was not only distraught about his father being a serial killer, but learning that his father was paroled and living in the city at a nearby hotel. (He was paroled because he was only convicted on one murder and supposedly showed “good behavior” while in prison.)

Suffice it so say, Slaughter’s research about 1970s Atlanta paid off because I could have read an entire book just from Wagner and Mitchell’s vantage point as two women trying to break through the old boys network of the APD. Heck, I’d take an entire spin-off series, if you’re reading, Slaughter! It read believable, especially how Wagner built-up to her steeliness and found her backbone. So much so, that when the time came to confront the serial killer, Trent’s father, a hulk of a man, she didn’t hesitate to do so. I had chills as she jumped out of the patrol vehicle, her pantyhose ripping, and her gun at the ready to go confront him. She ultimately prevailed, of course, and the rest is history. Through all of this, we learn why Wagner is the way she is. Her superior, a Black Sergeant who was also trying to break through the white old boys network, Hodge, was aloof and puzzling in the same way as Wagner is to Trent (although she’s a bit more cruel!). Slaughter also answered a longstanding question I’ve had since diving into the Trent series: How the heck did Trent, who is dyslexic, get into the Georgia Bureau of Investigation? Wagner recruited him from college. In fact, she did more than that. She knew she couldn’t adopt him as a single 25-year-old woman in 1975, so she set him up with a good child’s home with a good woman and checked up on him. Then, later, helped him get back on his feet through college and then to the GBI. The reason Wagner didn’t tell him all of what transpired in the book was because she swore to protect him and give him a good life. Even Trent’s name comes from Wagner: Wilbur (his full name) is her dad’s name and Trent is her maiden name.

As for what Wagner was attempting to search for at the child’s home, when the case wrapped up in 1975, Mitchell primarily, but Wagner, too, felt like they were missing something. Mitchell suspected that Lucy’s brother, Hank, wanted her dead because then he’d inherit their parents’ lofty estate. He also wanted another prostitute that ran in Lucy’s circles, Kitty, to be in his control to blackmail her father who ran the law firm he wanted to be at the helm of. He achieved both of those by working with Trent’s dad, the serial killer. He even took Kitty as his wife. A different prostitute was killed in 1975 in a manner that didn’t match the serial killer, however. Mitchell suspected it might be Hank, and for Wagner to keep the skin found underneath her fingernails. She did, and apparently it was left in the child’s home all that time. I don’t think that will hold up in court to convict Hank (chain-of-custody issues), but I’m glad Slaughter at least brought it back around.

Somehow, Trent’s dad was able to continue killing at the hotel he was in, using the hotel’s basement (I don’t know how he procured the key to do so!). Upon not seeing Trent’s dad since the GBI had him under surveillance, they discovered that he died in bed. Trent is incensed because he wanted to kill him and he wanted his dad to know he had killed him. Alas. Wagner, Trent, and the others watch a surveillance tape from the hotel. They know a prostitute went up to his room and then left sometime before his death. Then, Slaughter hits us with this at the end: It was Angie posing as a prostitute who snuck in to kill Trent’s dad just to continue demonstrating her power over Trent. Agh, as I say at the end of every review in the Trent series, I hate Angie! She’s the most despicable villain in all of these books for the way she treats Trent and Sara and is interfering with their blossoming relationship. I will just have to keep reading to see what happens next!