Broken by Karin Slaughter

 

Doctor Sara Linton is headed home for Thanksgiving.  She doesn't go home anymore.  Instead she moved to Atlanta where she works in a busy emergency room and where she doesn't have as much time to think about how her husband was shot down before her.  She knows she won't ever get over his death but it's good to be busy all the time.

But this trip won't be a relaxing one.  Sara arrives home to find the town abuzz.  A local college girl has been pulled from the lake, weighed down with cinder blocks.  There's a suicide note but there's also a stab wound to the neck so it's a murder.  When the police go to her apartment, they find a man already there.  He has something in his hands and when they try to arrest him, he runs and ends up stabbing one of the police.  The policeman is taken to the hospital and the man, a young mentally challenged teenager, is taken to the station.  There Lena Adams gets a confession from him.  The man begs to see Sara as she had been his pediatrician growing up and he trusts her.  But when Sara arrives, it is to find Tommy dead in his cell, his wrists slit with a pen.  

With a disaster this large, the state needs to be called in.  Sara calls the head of the force and asks that Will Trent and his partner be sent.  Will's partner can't come as she is about to give birth so Will heads down alone.  He arrives to find a hostile police force but that's common.  But it's not common to find the level of lies and deception he is met with.  Can he find the truth?

This is the fourth Will Trent novel.  In it, his attraction to Sara deepens and hers to him although it's unclear if they will ever act on it.  Will is still married, although that's a loose term for a wife who left within a week of their marriage and only rarely returns for a day or so.  There is a subplot about the animosity between Sara and Lena since Sara blames Lena for her husband's death.  The twists and turns are exciting and the ending comes with a surprise.  Will Trent is on of the most fascinating characters I've encountered in a crime series.  This book is recommended for mystery  readers.