Book Review: The Kept Woman

Spoilers!

Hate is a strong word, but phew, do I strongly dislike Angie Polaski, the estranged, psychotic wife of Will Trent in Karin Slaughter’s series for him. She and Will grew up in a foster home together, and for the next 30 years, she manipulated him, physically and emotionally. Now, with Will well into his relationship with Sara Linton from Slaughter’s previous Grant County series, she’s still trying to meddle in their relationship because she just can’t handle Will loving someone else, or Will being happy. The 8th book in Slaughter’s Trent series, 2016’s The Kept Woman, is all about Angie, as hopefully, Slaughter closes the book on the Angie-Will saga. As I’ve always said with Slaughter’s Trent series, the books are about him technically, but center other characters in his life. In the previous book, Unseen, Slaughter closed the Sara-Lena saga that ensnared Will, too. With The Kept Woman, it’s time to return to Angie. I think what most frustrated me with this book is that we left the last one with Will promising to be open with Sara and tell her everything. Instead, The Kept Woman Will is still keeping secrets about Angie (another way of saying that is withholding information, or lying). Because of that, the tension between Sara and Will, as their relationship was blossoming, that I hoped was over after the prior book, permeates this one.

In The Kept Woman, Will, his partner at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Faith, his boss, Amanda, and Sara, who is now the medical examiner for the GBI, have quite the mess of Angie’s doing to untangle. Angie has a daughter, Jo (the “kept woman”), from when she was 16, but abandoned at the same age. Now a mother herself to her son Anthony, Jo is in an abusive relationship with a famous NBA basketball player. That player is on the same team as another, more famous NBA basketball player and they’re all under the same agency. This agency is set to break ground on a $2 billion-something shopping mall complex in Atlanta. This agency and its henchmen, including a former corrupt and pedophilic cop, Harding, will do anything to ensure they break ground on this new complex and protect the image of their star players. If that means making sure a rape charge against one of the players doesn’t stick, then so be it. (In that situation, Angie, to get close to her daughter by getting into the agency, helped make the rape case go away, which hurt Will, naturally, since it was his case.)

Harding is the corrupt and pedophilic cop who was tricking Angie out at the age of 10, and her uncle no less since his sister was Angie’s mother. He even tricked out his own daughter, Delilah, and hooked her on drugs. Knowing he was dying though, Harding tried to set it up for Delilah to get a big windfall of cash from his work in the agency. He just needed Angie to play her part. Instead, Angie decides to help her daughter (who doesn’t know Angie is her mother), Jo, and her son (Angie’s grandson), escape the NBA player’s abusiveness. Things don’t quite go according to plan, however. Despite being on death’s door, Harding is able to kidnap Jo and send Anthony to be with “mama,” the woman who corrals and controls other prostitutes. At the warehouse that is set to be the site of the groundbreaking, Harding and Delilah confront Angie. Angie shoots Delilah in the leg and runs into the warehouse looking for Jo. Delilah is somehow able to catch up and stab Angie in the stomach and probably cause a concussion by slamming her head into the concrete. Delilah then, a psycho herself apparently, decides to stab Jo multiple times, nearly separating Jo’s hand from her wrist in the process. Angie revives and tosses Delilah off of a balcony, nearly killing her. Before Harding can finish Angie and Jo off, he succumbs to end-stage renal disease since he went off his dialysis treatment.

Angie complicates matters by trying to stage the scene to mess with Will because she always messes with Will. She wants Will and the GBI to think it’s Jo who is dead and in a local funeral home morgue, not Delilah. Or that it’s herself who is dead, just to make Will feel anguished even more. Instead, Jo, thanks to another dirty cop, is saved at the Grady Hospital. Angie then finishes off Delilah (hence her being at the morgue), and then is set to rescue Anthony somehow from “mama.” Instead, she runs right into Will and the GBI, who then mount their own rescue plan for Anthony. “Mama” and the NBA player dad have a meet-up at a local mall, where presumably the “mama” is going to try to blackmail money out of the dad in exchange for the son. Because the other variable here is that Jo, then Angie, and presumably now the “Mama,” have video of that NBA player and the more famous one raping a woman (the same case Will was working prior to the events of this book). At the mall, everything goes haywire, though. Losing control, the one thing an abuser like him can’t abide by, the NBA player knifes “mama” to death, shoots her sidekick in the head, and then is threatening to shoot his own son (better, in his mind, to do that than leave him without his mother), but instead turns the gun on himself.

What a mess, and yet again, at the heart of it is Angie pulling the strings and finding time to manipulate and hurt Will, which then means it causes the aforementioned tension in his and Sara’s relationship. Sara is disgusted by Angie not only interfering in their lives by her presence and her taunting, nasty letters she leaves for Sara, but she literally breaks into Will’s house and steals Sara’s things, including cloning her laptop. In real time, even at the end of the book, she’s still invading Sara’s privacy with that laptop. Which means even after everything, including Will finally telling Angie “it is over,” she’s winning! She’s getting one up on Sara and thus, Will. Grr.

That all said, as awful as Angie is, as awful as so many of the characters in The Kept Woman are, from Harding to the agency head to the NBA players and so on, this was a much better book than Unseen, which I called the weakest of the Trent series to that point. The Kept Woman has great character work, particularly with Will, Angie, and Sara. Though as readers, we despise Angie for what she’s doing to the other two, we at least understand why she is the way she is, given her childhood. And despite her awfulness, she did try to help Jo and Anthony escape an abusive household. But if she was a good person, doing the right thing, she would have asked for Will’s help from the get-go and avoided all the aforementioned messiness and violence. Alas. The plotting and story beats moved at a faster pace, too, making a nearly 600-page book (mass market paperback version) not feel nearly that long. I wanted to see how all of the disparate, ugly pieces of this vintage Slaughter puzzle were going to come together. And of course, ultimately, I was also rooting for Sara and Will to overcome all the ugliness and forge ahead as a couple. Happy and in love. Slaughter leaves that open-ended, pun intended. At the end, Sara decides to go to Will, hoping he’s standing outside her door, waiting, and if he’s not, taking that as a sign their relationship is over. We don’t know if he’s waiting or not. (I know he is, but nonetheless!)

Onward with Will Trent!