Far beneath the lake in Karin Slaughter’s fictional south Georgia town of Heartsdale lies an entire cotton mill village — “abandoned houses, small cottages and shacks…stores and churches.” One icy November day, the body of a college student joins the sunken treasures.
At first, a note on the shore points to suicide; but after discovering a stab wound on the back of the young woman’s neck, detective Lena Adams and her boss, booze hound chief of police Frank Wallace, descend on the victim’s apartment in hopes of finding clues to the murderer. There, through an unfortunate combination of impulsive, ill-advised moves, their chief suspect ends up dead.
He also may have been innocent.
In “Broken,” Georgia native Slaughter’s eighth addition to her addictive, terrific Grant County series, things in Heartsdale have changed drastically since the late Jeffrey Tolliver ran the police department. The town is looking darker and bleaker than it did the last time we saw it (“Beyond Reach,” 2007); economic hardships are evident in the closed hospital and military base, the abandoned big-box store.
Home for Thanksgiving, Tolliver’s widow, pediatrician and former county coroner Sara Linton, is called into the murder case on the strength of a prior connection with the suspect. Barely recovered from the loss of her husband, the last person Sara wants to see is Lena, once his protégé —and the woman Sara blames for Jeffrey’s death.
When she hears the details of the botched arrest, Sara’s long-standing hatred for Lena flares, and she alerts the GBI in hopes that Lena will finally be exposed for her lethally sloppy police work. The investigator they send is Special Agent Will Trent; with Sara’s help, he will systematically dismantle Lena and Frank’s hasty cover-up of their procedural mistakes.
That is, if they really are mistakes. No one knows quite what happened when Lena and Frank drew their guns in the take-down at the dead girl’s apartment, least of all Lena. Frank keeps feeding her a scenario that almost fits, but under Will’s skillful questioning, the facts she was so sure about—the suspect had a knife, he stabbed Lena’s partner, he’s had recent run-ins with the police—are slipping away.
It’s all too familiar to Lena, who’s noticed the same pattern in the Heartsdale Police Department since Jeffrey died and Frank took over. “It was slow at first and hard to spot…Tickets disappeared. Cash was missing from the evidence locker. Requisitions turned iffy.” Soon, “every cop on the force was doing something they shouldn’t do.”
She's ready to get out, and it's not just the corruption; Lena's been convinced since Jeffrey’s death that she’s the wrong one to safeguard other people’s lives: “You could make one mistake and it could cost a life—not your own, but another person’s. You could end up getting someone’s son killed. Someone’s husband.” But before Lena can do the right thing, Frank, whose urgency to close the case suggests more than just a fear of departmental reprisal, blackmails her into keeping her mouth shut.
Karin Slaughter is a terrific writer, and she keeps the emotional tension high throughout by pitting cop against cop in a story where the line between good guy and bad guy is sometimes very thin indeed. If the Grant County police department thinks it can stage a cover-up with Will Trent around, they’ve got another think coming: He’s so practiced at cover-ups that no one would ever dream he can’t even read a police report.
Not that he doesn’t wish things were different. Everyone in “Broken” would like a fix, something to make their lives work again. Will and Sara, whose mutual attraction began in 2009’s “Undone,” want to fall in love. Lena has her eyes on a job that will take her off the front lines. All the college girl wanted was for her broken-down car to work and her boyfriend to like her.
Slaughter, ever the realist, refuses to wave anyone through. Instead, she shows us that the past, lurking in our depths like the buried city beneath Lake Grant, continually exerts its hold over us. It’s not easy to move forward in spite of it, even when we think our cracks are firmly glued together. Strong at the broken places may apply, but just barely.
FICTION
"Broken"
Karin Slaughter
Delacorte Press, $26, 416 pages
Book event
Reading and signing
7:15 p.m. Thursday, July 1. Free. Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse in conjunction with Georgia Center for the Book, Decatur Library Auditorium, 215 Sycamore St., Decatur. 404-370-8450 Ext. 2225, www.georgiacenterforthebook.org
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