Fallen
Karin Slaughter’s Will Trent series combines (generally) very disturbed characters both the criminals and the investigators. Sometimes the “cops” seem much more damaged than the unsubs…they’re just not serial killers. In Fallen, Faith, Will Trent’s partner, encounters a criminal encounter a little too close to home. As her team works to resolve the apparently bloody abduction, she works hard to find the perpetrators as she tries to hold herself together.
“Competing sirens filled the air. Police cruisers. Ambulances. A fire truck. The call had gone out. Code 30. Officer needs emergency assistance. Three men shot to death. Her baby locked in a shed. Her mother missing. Faith sat back on her heels. She put her head in her shaking hands and willed herself not to cry.”
“If she was telling the truth, Allison’s mind had turned toward dark thinking long before the newspaper story. She couldn’t blame the weather completely, but certainly the constant rain, the unrelenting overcast, had churned up inside of her mind its own kind of despair. How much easier would it be if she just gave in? Why go back to Elba and turn into some toothless, haggard old woman with eighteen kids to feed when she could just walk into the lake and for once take control of her destiny?”
A drive in the evening puts an elderly couple in a rural area when the husband hits something. Thinking of a wild animal, the stop the car to check. A naked body is what they find and the damage from them hitting her is the least of her problems. Will Trent, the troubled Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) finds himself attracted to the case much to the dismay of the local police. The novel is laced with friction between GBI and the local police to the point where it should be criminal. When another woman goes missing things heat up. Is she the next victim?
“I’m not going to have this conversation with you.†So they were back to him being the boss again. Faith bit her lip, trying not to let her sarcasm escalate the situation. He could live in fairyland all he wanted, but Faith was fairly certain that there would not be a happy ending to this story. Will pressed the point. “I can’t believe she’s dead, Faith. Emma’s a fighter. She’s out there somewhere waiting for us to find her.†The passion in his voice was unmistakable, and instead of feeling irritated, she now felt sorry for him. He said, “I should’ve gotten more from Bernard. He was so smug, so sure that he was in control. I feel like I played right into his hands.â€