Spoilers (including for Slaughter’s previous Grant County series)!
Perhaps the scariest aspect of serial killers — bona fide sociopaths — is the ease with which they blend into the trappings of normal society and life. Even though they necessarily need to mimic compassion and empathy so as to blend in, they do not feel such emotions. When they talk about their cruel, sadistic murders, it’s as if relaying a book report; it’s matter-of-fact, if not with an undercurrent of reliving-it-glee. There is no current author better able to depict the depravity and horror of serial killers and this emotionless blending in dynamic than Karin Slaughter. She’s well-known for writing raw, as-authentic-as-possible rapes and murders. Slaughter believes being so unflinching in writing such stories helps her to tell another side of the story not seen in books as much: the long-lasting effects of trauma and the survivors experiencing it. Her 2020 book, The Silent Wife, the 10th book in her Will Trent series, somehow might be her most troubling, disturbing book to date (as far as I’ve read), which is saying something.
Slaughter’s book does something she hasn’t done in quite some time, and in some respects, ever: She writes about Jeffrey Tolliver, the co-protagonist of her previous series about Grant County, Georgia. He’s the chief of police and Sara Linton’s, the town’s pediatrician-turned-coroner, husband. Readers of the Grant County series know Jeffrey and Sara were married twice. The first time ended in divorce after he cheated on her. Then they rekindled their relationship and married again. Their second marriage ended explosively in a different way: Jeffrey being blown up in a targeted attack. So, the Will Trent series is partly Sara dealing with her grief and partly falling in love with Will and their dynamic as a blossoming couple. As Slaughter mentions in her Author’s Note, “I bet you guys didn’t notice that I’ve been secretly writing love stories.” However, what was new about this telling of Jeffrey and Sara’s story in The Silent Wife is that Slaughter told a snippet of the divorce and animosity between them prior to rekindling. It was interesting to see! Slaughter often uses her titles to have double meaning; in one scene, Jeffrey tells Sara after they married, she became the “silent wife.” She stopped sharing her intimate details with him and instead used her family as her refugee. (That obviously doesn’t justify his cheating ways, though!) But also, for the purposes of this book, Slaughter utilized what she calls “Karin Years.” The first book in the Grant County series, Blindsighted, came out in 2001. In that one, Sara and Jeffrey are already divorced. She didn’t want to make Sara 40 years old, along with technology issues. So, she retconned the timeline to make the divorce period occur eight years ago — Jeffrey’s death was five years ago in the Will Trent timeline.
Now then, in the present time of Will and Sara in Atlanta with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), a convicted pedophile, Darryl Nesbit, is claiming he is not the serial killer Jeffrey and his team put away for a slew of college murders eight years ago. He claims the killer is still out there and has killed in the eight years since his arrest. Naturally, Will and Sara, along with Faith, Will’s partner, and Amanda, the GBI head, start looking into this. One of the first places to start is none other than Lena Adams, Jeffrey’s former problematic underling. They need to see if her police notes about how they found the child porn on Daryl Nesbit’s computer is accurate. It was that “happenstance” that Nesbit actually went to prison for, not the murders. Lena is her awful self and tells them she shredded her notes. Of course.
Back eight years ago with Jeffrey in Grant County, a college girl is found in the woods seemingly dead. Sara and Jeffrey approach the scene and are talking when Sara realizes Beckey is still alive. Lena not only didn’t check for a pulse, she also let a witness, another college girl, walk back to her dorm by herself. That girl would become the next victim of the killer. Lena is awful, and is constantly trying to hide her incompetence and mistakes. And Jeffrey yells at her, but ultimately wields her to achieve his ends of catching the presumed killer, who he thinks is Daryl.
The serial killer is taking trophies: hair accessories, like scrunchies and hairbands. These aren’t random hair accessories, either, they have significance to the victims and/or survivors. Worse, though, is what he’s doing to the victims. Many of the potential victims/survivors are depicted as “accident” cases because he attacks them in such a way that it appears they tripped on a rock while in the woods. In reality, he’s smashing them in the back of the head with a hammer and then using the date rape drug to paralyze them. This is his way of ensuring a “silent wife,” the other meaning of the book’s title. Later, he learns from this and instead paralyzes them with a tiny needle poke to the back of the neck. Once paralyzed, he can rape them, leave, return, rape them, etc. In that “leaving period” is when some are able to survive and one even becomes a pivotal witness in catching the real killer. But yes, sick and depraved, to say the least. In one instance with the witness to Beckey’s attack, he breaks off the hammer inside her. I’m not going to elaborate.
Horrific. Slaughter, man.
Meanwhile, Will and Sara are shaky again, disconnected, primarily owing to Jeffrey coming back into Sara’s life in this way, but also, at one point, Sara acts similar to Angie, Will’s former, abusive ex-wife, by trying to make everything right with rough sex. That categorically turns Will off. It shocked me to see Sara act like that, too! She’s supposed to be different than Angie, which is what Will is thinking. On the Jeffrey and Sara side, Sara knows Jeffrey must have cheated on her with more than one woman. Jeffrey won’t admit it. Furthermore, he deletes evidence that it was more than one woman (it was at least six). I don’t like Jeffrey as a person because of that, and I certainly don’t like him as a cop because of his willingness to venture into the grey area to effectuate an arrest. When it comes time to catch Daryl (an incredibly tense, sweaty-palms written chapter by Slaughter), Jeffrey has Lena lead on going into the house on the pretext of smelling weed on Daryl, knowing Lena is willing to lie. Ugh. But yeah, they never ended up connecting Daryl to those cases.
The real killer is not one I predicted. Honestly, I was thinking it might be Nick, a fellow GBI agent who was close to Jeffrey. Instead, it was someone else connected to Sara, Brock, a fellow coroner. They’d been friends since kindergarten and apparently, she was the only woman ever “nice” to him. He hated women. From an early age, he was using his dad’s occupation as a funeral home director to desecrate corpses sexually. Then he learned he liked the “living, warm bodies” better, hence why he started attacking women. Worse still, when his victims came back to his funeral home, he violated them again as corpses.
Horrific. Slaughter, man. (Worth doing that again.)
Sara confronts Brock, but Brock is two steps ahead. He already killed his mother before she could find out his deeds and then kills himself before Will or Faith can arrest him. The silver living in this twisted awfulness is they are able to save Brock’s latest would-be victim, Gina. Interspersed throughout the book were the chapters about Gina knowing she was being stalked but feeling like she was going insane. Those chapters alone, along with her rescue, would have made a compelling, unnerving novella on its own.
The other silver lining — because Slaughter writes love stories, after all — is Sara and Will have an honest conversation and reconnect. Indeed, the book ends with them but proposing to the other. They’re finally going to get married! Two more books (so far) to go for me to catch up on the Will Trent series, but then it occurred to me, I haven’t actually finished the Grant County series! I haven’t read the first four books. Ope. I’ll be circling back to those soon enough.
As I said, though, Slaughter remains untouchable in her ability to write the most skin-crawling scenes imaginable, while also writing with a touch of humanity. Her characters are complex, nuanced, in that grey space at times, and people series readers, including me, have attached themselves to for good reason and because of that complexity: they’re very human, as we all are.
Milam's Musings 