Indelible

When medical examiner Sara Linton and police chief Jeffrey Tolliver take a trip away from the small town of Heartsdale - an escape from all the pressures which complicate their relationship - it should be a straightforward weekend at the beach. But they decide to take a detour via Jeffrey's hometown and things go violently wrong when Jeffrey's best friend Robert shoots dead an intruder who breaks into his house. Jeffrey and Sara are first on the scene and Jeffrey's keen to clear his friend's name, but for Sara things aren't so simple. The sear marks around the bullet-hole don't tally with Robert's story. Robert's wife, Jessie, is incoherent and confused. And when Jeffrey appears to change the crime scene, Sara no longer knows who to trust. Twelve years later, Sara and Jeffrey are caught up in a shockingly brutal attack which threatens to destroy both their lives. But they're not random victims. They've been targeted. And it seems the past is catching up with both of them...

Medical examiner Sara Linton and police chief Jeffrey Tolliver make their fourth appearance in this riveting new back-and-forth thriller that grounds a brutal attack by two young men on the Grant County, Georgia police department in a twelve-year-old Alabama murder case that occurred while Sara and Jeffrey were just beginning their tumultuous romance. En route to a beach vacation shortly after they meet, the couple takes a detour to the small town where Jeffrey grew up and began his law enforcement career. But their carefree holiday is interrupted when his best friend from childhood, a fellow cop, is charged with murder after killing a man who broke into his house. Despite his subsequent confession, Jeffrey believes there’s more to the story than Robert is telling him, and when the skeleton of a young woman with whom both Robert and Tolliver were once involved is discovered in a secret cave only they knew about, and Robert admits to her murder too, Tolliver must again confront a past he thought he had long since put behind him.

Slaughter unravels a convoluted story deftly and smoothly as the action moves between those long-ago events and the siege of the police station by two young men who are determined to make Jeffrey pay for a crime they believe he committed. Threatening to kill whoever stands between them and their target--including eight children on a school field trip at the station house when the bloody siege begins--they execute a deputy they mistakenly believe is Tolliver. Skillfully blending past and present events and illuminating the equally convoluted relationship between Sara and Jeffrey (who have married and divorced in the intervening years) without interrupting the breathtaking pace of the action or dropping a beat, Slaughter takes this series to a new level of excellence. --Jane Adams