My Last 3 Mystery Reads

As a big fan of Karin Slaughter’s adapted Will Trent series (new season when?!), I decided to read her new series. Where the book starts and where it goes are done in stages, and if you don’t like any kind of spoilers, you can skip my thoughts.

This felt like the first two books in the series—which would have had a big cliffhanger at the end of book one, with readers having to wait a whole year for book two—joined together. It’s a procedural that starts as a missing teenagers case: Emmy Clifton is an officer in Clifton County when two teenagers, Madison and Cheyenne, disappear while everyone is celebrating the 4th of July. Emmy’s best friend is the mother of one of the girls, putting added pressure on Emmy and the investigation. As the search for the girls ramps up, and a deep dive into what these girls’ private lives really entailed, Emmy also deals with a crappy husband, a mother with dementia, her father being the Sheriff, a fallout with her best friend, and a lot of extended family drama—which bleeds out into the town and everyone’s lives.

(Spoiler for how the book is formatted) The book then jumps over a decade into the future: along with Emmy’s point of view, we get a new investigator, recently retired from the FBI, Jude Archer. Not only is there plenty from the past to solve, but there’s a new case, and Emmy and Jude are forced to work together, complicating Emmy’s life further as she already has to deal with the fallout from a lot of what happened in the beginning of the book (purposely being vague here).

If you like your crime novels layered, that is what Slaughter is writing. Her themes are always dark and graphic, and this book is no exception. Sometimes this opens the door for very real things, like predators and “look how dark and messed up being a girl can be,” to feel “exaggerated” when they’re on the page, but procedural fans that want to be taken on a long journey will be satisfied and end up looking forward to the next book.