Wendy Darling's Reviews > After That Night

3.5 stars for merit, less than that on personal feeling. General spoilers below, though you can tell most of what’s discussed by reading between the lines of the dust jacket.

My overall feeling: I don’t need for absolutely everything to be connected.

Over the course of 20+ years, Slaughter has slowly unveiled a lot of shocking information, or revelations about previously unknown facts that lend extra weight and poignancy to the history and relationships we know. She’s done it with incredibly hard scenarios, even circling back with dead characters, and most of the time it’s been done with a judicious, compassionate eye.

But I just couldn’t buy into the number of threads binding everything together in this novel, nor do I think they add significant layers to the existing story. To name just a few, over the years, we went from Faith’s dedication to her job as a cop/GBI agent back to her mom Evelyn’s job as a cop and now Faith’s son Jeremy getting involved in the investigation. Amanda’s ties to Faith and Evelyn have always felt strong, but I didn’t love Criminal’s deep dive into her past, and I have very mixed feelings on Amanda’s ongoing interference in Will’s childhood, career, and present life. It’s all just too conveniently—and not always convincingly—tied together.

Most of all, however, I feel such unease about taking one of the most defining, heart-wrenching moments in Sara Linton’s life—her rape when she was a young doctor—and turning it into part of a organized conspiracy 16 books later. The main plot, centered around a group of men who have a ridiculously regimented rape club, introduces and assembles whole new characters and histories and feels like a lurid CSI: Georgia episode. Does it do her a disservice to relegate this experience to a footnote in their games? Does it change how we look on violent crimes against women? Do her pain and altered life trajectory have further meaning because they’re now been made to be part of a bigger story? The fact is, finding meaning in crime in real life is often a futile exercise. What happens to victims of crime is often all the more tragic precisely because it is so random.

This retconning of Sara’s history feels lacking in genuine purpose and feeling. It really upsets me, actually, even as I appreciate how Slaughter continues to build on Will and Sara together and can acknowledge the technical skill in how the plot unfolds. I don’t know. I feel very unsettled and disappointed, in part because I just went through and reread the entire Grant County and Will Trent series, which are still overall unbeatable thrillers in terms of writing and plotting and character development.

Sara is an incredible character. (view spoiler)[I mean, two books ago, while in captivity, the woman doggedly broke rigor mortis on a corpse’s fingers and then used her fucking teeth to close up the fist again so the hidden message would remain undiscovered. (hide spoiler)] I have not been a fan of how she, who has always been a main character and driving force of these books, has been sidelined in the titles for presumably marketing reasons--they are just as much her books as they are Will’s (and several of the titles refer directly to her). But I didn’t expect that any Slaughter book’s content would ever do the same to Sara's history. Before this book, Sara had come to terms with what had happened to her, and was at peace with the fact that those who knew her did not see her as a victim, but as the tough, kind, intelligent person that she is.

Sara fought hard not to let that one moment define her. But here we are, forcing her to relive her trauma yet again.