Rosie Morgan's Reviews > After That Night

** spoiler alert ** I am annoyed. I have been reading Karin Slaughter books for almost 20 years now and loved the majority of them. They've been going downhill for a while (Silent Witness was lazy, False Witness seemed like it relied on shock value and Girl, Forgotten was meh) but this one, this one! The giant, glaring plot hole that propels this one forward had me wanting to rip my hair out.

A lot of emphasis is put on the fact that Sara had gone to court for her 15 year old rape and assault, the guy was charged and served his sentence. But she didn't tell anyone she became pregnant due to the rape, had an ectopic pregnancy, a partial hysterectomy and can no longer have children as a result. She is terrified of this getting out, of having to relive this trauma in open court, of having to explain herself to strangers.

Except she already did. In the first book of the Grant Country series, she leaves the court transcript for Jeffrey to read as a way of telling him. Page 275 to 276 of the paperback edition of Blindsighted, published in 2001, reads as follows:

Q: Could you tell me what happened subsequent to the rape?
A: I became pregnant from this contact, and subsequently developed an ectopic pregnancy, which is to say that an egg was implanted in my fallopian tube. There was a rupture which caused bleeding into my abdomen.
Q: What effect, if any, has this had on you?
A: A partial hysterectomy was performed wherein my reproductive organs were removed. I can no longer have children.

There was also no mention of her being drugged prior to the assault, so this has just been retconned in to fit the story. In addition to this, Will's aunt is called Elizabeth, not Eliza, in the book Criminal (2012), which deals with his past and she is introduced. And Faith is well and truly there, an integral part of the team, and she is aware of this aunt, but she somehow managed to forget that in this book? She is also aware of Sara's past to some extent, though I don't know that she was sure whether the rape case Sara was involved in was her own. Lazy, lazy writing. I cannot know these characters better than their author, surely?

This whole plot was basically like a redo of Pretty Girls, but with Sara and Will chucked in there to make it, what, more impactful? That book already hit pretty hard, but it started a trend of ever-increasingly graphic descriptions of rape, and it morphed into more of those descriptions coming from the perpetrators.

The thing I loved about Slaughter was the empathy she showed with these characters - they experienced trauma, sure, it's a crime novel, but they also went through the aftermath and were seen dealing with the ripple effect of that damage. Lena was by far the most polarising character in the Grant County series. She was traumatised, unstable and hanging on by her fingertips. But her experiences, while graphic, were not excessively overwritten to the point of being gratuitous. Kisscut was one of the most uncomfortable books to read, as she is dealing with the repercussions of her kidnapping and rape, but it never tips over into shock value.

By this book, I'm reading men talking about gagging some b!tch with their c0ck and in False Witness, we're treated to countless repetitions of things the rapist and pedofile said during the act.

I kept going to see if it would improve. It didn't. KS has been my go-to for crime novels for a long time, but I am beginning to lose faith in her output. It's a shame.