Sherrif Emmy Clifford and her retired FBI sister Jude have just returned from their mother’s funeral when they hear shots being fired at the house of Emmy’s erstwhile friend Alison. Inside, Alison is found dead and her daughter critically injured. Emmy investigates and before long, suspicion falls upon Alison’s abusive husband Bill. He is the obvious suspect and the sleepy, sedate, tight community of the town of North Falls rallies for Emmy to arrest him, but Emmy is not so sure and the more she investigates, the more she begins to suspect that Alison was handling more than she could carry.
Every year I buy the latest Karin Slaughter novel, and every year I wonder why I bother. Well, that’s not entirely true; I liked the last North Falls book well enough and she’s written some real bangers. I loved some of her standalones (Cop Town, the Good Daughter) and her Grant County series is amazing, but those books hinged on character development and tight plotting. Unfortunately, that’s where this one comes off the rails.
Middle-aged women don’t get enough attention in fiction, and I like that the book centers on two women – one in her mid-forties, one in her mid-sixties – who both work in male-dominated environments. In theory, it could have been great and yeah, Jude was pretty badass in the last book without becoming annoyingly perfect, but in this one she’s reduced to a barrel of doubts on one hand and exposition on the other. Emmy, I’m sorry to say, is just not that interesting. Character development is minimal (in Jude’s case) or uneven and abrupt (Emmy).
More than that, the novel suffers from a convoluted plot that is clearly meant to put us on the wrong foot. It didn’t work; I figured out the whodunnit pretty much from the get-go and I’m pretty dumb when it comes to that. That is one thing, but I found the whole plot of Alison’s background pretty confusing. I guess it’s meant to show that criminal investigations don’t always neatly follow up one lead with the other, but the prose should’ve been a lot clearer. Some turns of phrase are so confusing and nonsensical that it’s almost as if her editor missed a few steps. That’s particularly frustrating because it just leads nowhere.
The Secrets We Hide is the second book in Slaughter’s North Falls series. Slaughter’s written a lot of series: the Grant County series that merged with her Will Trent series (fyi, those books are nothing like the show), two books that focus on an US Marshall, and now this one. I’ve grown quite tired of the Will Trent series (Sara Linton is exhausting) so I was happy that she’d decided a new one in the small town setting that worked so well for the Grant County books. And it has potential: the idea of a collective of quirky townsfolk isn’t a bad one per sé, particularly when Slaughter stays away from the overwrought interpersonal drama (which she largely does here). I was also quite happy that, for once, she’s written a book that doesn’t have graphic sexual assault in it – a first for Slaughter, who insists that she writes about violence against women to bring attention to the subject, but after twenty-odd books it was beginning to feel less like a good cause and more like a cash grab or a lack of imagination, so kudos to her for thinking outside of the box even if the bar is fairly low. I just wish she’d picked a better book for this change in direction.
