Indelible - Karin Slaughter

In Karin Slaughter's exciting new thriller, an officer is shot point-blank in the Grant County police station and police chief Jeffrey Tolliver is wounded, setting off a terrifying hostage situation with medical examiner Sara Linton at the center. Working outside the station, Lena Adams, newly reinstated to the force, and Frank Wallace, Jeffrey's second in command, must try to piece together who the shooter is and how to rescue their friends before Jeffrey dies. For the sins of the past have caught up with Sara and Jeffrey -- with a vengeance ...

Book nº 4 in the Grant County series this one is very different from the previous books. The focus is in Jeffrey and Sara's past as the key to an incident in their present and some crimes in their past.

The story opens with an attack on the police station by gunmen that leaves some of the officers dead, Jeffrey in serious condition and Sara and a group of school children as hostages. The action switches between the present and a holiday Jeffrey and Sara spent together when they were still dating in his hometown of Sylacauga. From previous books we know that Sara kept some secrets from Jeffrey for a very long time, in this book we discover he has quite a few unsolved things in his past too.

Its 1991 and in Sylacauga Sara meets Jeffrey's mother and some of his high school friends. One of those friends is involved in a shooting one night and it's easy to see, from the beginning, that things didn't happen just as he says. Jeffrey decides to investigate and things get even more complicated when the bones of a high school girl who had disappeared a few years earlier appears.

I really enjoyed this book. I think we need a change in the series as the Jeffrey/Sara relationship was getting a bit old, the number of serial killers you can find in a small town was making me stretch my believability and I think we needed to know more about Jeffrey's past.

Jumping between past and present worked perfectly, when I was in the present I was eager to get back to the past and see what more was happening and when I was in the past I wanted to come back to present and see how they were faring.

My only complaint is that the Jared storyline is never resolved and it felt a bit like a loose end. I closed the book not knowing if Jeffrey knew...

Grade: 4/5