Book Review: Unseen

Spoilers!

Karin Slaughter loves putting her characters through a physical and mental wood chipper, which means putting us readers through an emotional one. She did it again in her 2013 book, Unseen, the seventh book in the Will Trent series. As I’ve mentioned before in the Trent series, the books are about him, but often focus on the story arcs of other characters. That’s the case with Unseen, which returns us to the Lena Adams saga. Lena is the cop from Slaughter’s previous Grant County series and the partner of Jeffrey Tolliver. Tolliver was killed off in the series, and his widow, Sara Linton, blamed Lena for it believing her headstrong recklessness ensnared Tolliver to his untimely death. We last saw Lena in the Trent series in the fourth book, Broken, where it turned out she was dating Tolliver’s son, Jared. In this book, she’s since married him.

Unseen starts off sad and tragic and quickly turns explosive. Lena has seemingly lost her baby she was set to have with Jared, which has caused friction in their marriage. Just when it seems like they’re about to kiss and make up, Jared is shot from behind, thrusting Lena into a fight for her life against two assailants in the house. She’s able to kill one, and thanks to Jared grabbing the ankle of the other, neutralize the second. She’s about to brain him to death with a hammer when Will, of all people, stops her. We later learn that Will is working an undercover case that brought him to Lena and Jared’s home that night. Jared miraculously survives a sawed-off shotgun blast to the back, which brings Sara into the story to console Jared’s mother. Of course, Lena and Sara still do not remotely see eye-to-eye; Lena feels like she’s always tried to compare herself to Sara’s perfection, and Sara, as mentioned, blames Lena for her husband’s death.

Previous to the events that opened the book, we know that Lena and her team at the Macon, Georgia Police Department conducted a raid on a “shooting gallery” house (drug house) to catch a big-time drug dealer and rapist named Waller. The raid goes horribly wrong, though. Upon arriving at the house, three people are dead in the living room, none of them Waller, and the basement door is inexplicably locked, as if keeping someone inside. The police clear the house, including the basement. But they didn’t realize Waller was concealed in a secret panel along the way. He pops out, clocks one cop and holds another hostage. Lena confronts him and instead of giving up, he kills himself. We later learn that Lena and another detective working the case find a kidnapped boy also behind the secret panel.

That aforementioned detective and Will, through the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, are tracking a cop-killer and drug kingpin who seems to have moved from Florida to Georgia known as “Big Whitey.” Because the detective doesn’t trust the GBI and the GBI doesn’t trust her, they don’t compare notes (grr!). Will is undercover with the underlings of Big Whitey. Being undercover, and close to the Lena situation, causes friction between him and Sara. She’s sick of all his lying and not communicating to her, well, anything. Naturally, Faith Mitchell, Will’s partner (and Sara) suspect Lena may be dirty to have brought the “hit” on her and Jared at their home and/or have murdered one of the two suspects. But in my head, I’m thinking she so clearly was defending herself and Jared! She was heroic and bad-ass. As I said, though, Slaughter puts her characters through the wood chipper. Lena even remarks upon this, noting how she lost her twin sister, Tolliver, her baby, and now, nearly Jared.

Will, for his part, is going through the aforementioned mental woodchipper with Sara, but also physically. He’s a literal punching bag throughout the book, whether he’s being accosted by Big Whitey’s “redneck” goons, or the rogue police officer on the force trying to find out who nearly killed Lena and Jared. He’s almost the anti-Jack Reacher by way of comparison. I’m ready for Will to start kicking some ass! He hasn’t really had that moment through seven books now. As part of his undercover work, Will comes into contact with Tony and Cayla. He even witnesses Tony kill one of the cops involved in the raid on the shooting gallery. It becomes apparent that Big Whitey is targeting anyone associated with the raid. Cayla is a nurse at the Macon hospital Will’s working undercover at. My main theory throughout Unseen was that Cayla was “Big Whitey.” It would explain why Big Whitey was depicted as a ghost, never seen, because the kingpin being a woman would be a big tell, as it were. She even had a boy, Benji, in her house, who I suspected wasn’t there by his own free will. Alas, Cayla was culpable, just not Big Whitey. It turns out, the boy Lena and the detective rescued is the brother to Benji, and that Big Whitey in addition to being a cop killer and a drug peddler is also a pedophile. And it’s the chief of police of the Macon Police Department, no less. Cayla was with the chief’s son before he died of leukemia, and Tony just follows Cayla through anything. When Cayla overheard Jared joking that maybe the chief of police is Big Whitey at Lena’s OBGYN appointment, she relayed that to the chief. He took it seriously and put out the hit on Lena and Jared, which absolves Lena of any blame. At the end of the book, Tony lets Will live, still believing his undercover story. Cayla is killed fleeing police and Tony is arrested, flipping on everyone. Another cop on the raid was helping the chief of police, which is why the raid went so bad, but he redeemed himself at the end, recording everything he knew for Will before being killed by Tony.

As Slaughter sometimes does, much to my chagrin, the biggest potential moment of the book is done off page: The arrest of Big Whitey, the police chief. This was the villain of the entire book, propelling everything forward, and instead of the chief of police being confronted with the fact of being caught, it happened off page. Ahh!

That said, on the plus side, it seems like Will and Sara’s tension is finally gone. Will agreed to tell her everything. To be truthful. Finally! I look forward to moving past a lot of that tension that’s existed in the previous couple of books. Additionally, Lena has apparently stopped comparing herself to Sara and is moving on from their feud. The book ends with her sending Sara a postcard that simply states, “You win.” I hope for her part, Sara can also move on.

While Unseen is probably the weakest books of the Trent series up to the point of its release, it’s still a Slaughter book, which makes it entertaining, heartbreaking, tense, and a guessing game of whodunit. I think if the Big Whitey moment happens on page, and Will was able to get some licks in as the protagonist, then Unseen would have been that much better. On to the next one!