Review - The Silent Wife by Karin Slaughter

 Review - The Silent Wife by Karin Slaughter

A woman runs alone in the woods. She convinces herself she’s safe.

He watches

But a predator is watching from the shadows. Waiting for the perfect moment to attack.

He waits

They thought they caught him. But another victim has just been found.

The hunt has only just begun. And the killer is ready to strike again…

In The Silent Wife, Karin Slaughter goes back to the territory of her first series, the Grant County series that introduced Sara Linton and her on again off again husband, Jeffrey. Several other familiar faces pop up during the novel too. In some ways there's a sense of things coming full circle, with Sara being able to directly compare the two great loves of her life and I definitely got the feeling that this was something she absolutely had to do before her relationship with Will could develop further. Jeffrey's ghost has always hung over them, but in The Silent Wife she had to confront that ghost and put it to rest. 

Karin Slaughter was able to achieve this through a case that our investigators to look at some old cases of Jeffrey's, dating from the time between his and Sara's two marriages to each other, when they were decidedly not in love. The social interactions between them is often humorous and occasionally poignant, when the reader knows better than they do what lies ahead of them. I found myself actually watching them in flashbacks with the same mixture of moods that Sara had when she was recollecting. 

The cases themselves are brutal and shocking, disturbing in their detail and methodology. This is definitely not a book for the faint hearted and the violence, often sexual violence, shown towards women makes for very uncomfortable reading. As ever though, the focus is firmly on bringing justice to them rather than any kind of glorification in suffering. This is nasty and dark, but it isn't torture porn. 

The Silent Wife is fascinating, shocking, and feels like a crucial book in the series with its treatment of characters past and present.

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The Silent Wife by Karin Slaughter is out now, published by Harper Collins.

I was given a review copy via Netgalley in return for an honest review.