Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Slaughter returns to North Falls, Georgia, for another 15 horrifying rounds of domestic violence. If everyone in Clifton County knows everyone else, that may be because half the people in North Falls, one of the county’s four cities, are named Clifton. Det. Allison Vickery doesn’t turn up for the funeral of acting sheriff Emmy Clifton’s mother, Myrna Joy Clifton, first because she’s fleeing her abusive husband, Bill Garrison, then because she’s shot dead. Her murder pulls Emmy, who inherited her job and all its headaches when her father, veteran sheriff Gerald Clifton, was killed six weeks ago, and retired FBI agent Jude Archer, the much older sister who ran off to San Francisco 40 years back, away from the funeral rites and into another of Slaughter’s matchless webs of intrigue inside and outside the Clifton clan. Allison wasn’t the only person shot in the house she was frantic to leave, and the evidence suggests that the shooter had also been targeting her teenage daughter, Mandy, all along. Working closely together even though their troubled family history puts them constantly at odds, Emmy and Jude thrash through a thicket of wrongdoing, from a thriving drug ring to a corrupt cop who’s rumored to have buried some crucial evidence, before they link Allison’s killing to an ancient murder trial that took a 180-degree turn after one of the jurors died. Every twist in the path to the truth is riveting—especially the final revelation, which puts all the others in the shade—but the most important relationship is between the two investigators, one of whom harbors a secret the other can’t imagine. Just like politics, all the crime in this corner of Georgia turns out to be painfully local. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.