FAITHLESS

A chilling discovery in an unmarked grave leads Grant County Medical Examiner Dr. Sara Linton and Detective Lena Adams to an evangelical family even more dysfunctional than theirs.

Grant County Police Chief Jeffrey Tolliver, Sara’s former husband and present lover, makes the discovery on the shore of Lake Grant: An anonymous young woman has been buried alive in a wooden box, a metal pipe to the surface evidently not having provided enough air to keep her alive. Actually, Abigail Bennett’s death was considerably more brutal than that, as Sara’s unsparing autopsy will reveal. After she was buried—perhaps several days after—someone dropped cyanide into the pipe, abruptly cutting her bizarre imprisonment short. The trail that leads to Abby’s family, soy farmers who run the Holy Grown farm under the aegis of Rev. Thomas Ward’s Church of the Greater Good, reveals that this isn’t the first time the family has buried one of its own in preparation for her correction and resurrection. And the closer Sara and Lena look into the Wards and the Bennetts, the more they wonder about their own untidy domestic entanglements—Sara’s with an ex-husband she’s keeping secret from her family, Lena’s with a live-in abuser.

Abating the Shock and Awe forensics that made Sara and Lena’s first four cases (Indelible, 2004, etc.) so unforgettable, Slaughter turns a compassionate eye on a brace of female victims and still manages to come across as the toughest cookie in Georgia.