THE KEPT WOMAN

After two intense stand-alones (Pretty Girls, 2015, etc.), Slaughter brings back the regulars whose personal problems are just as dark, urgent, and potentially violent as those of the criminals they investigate.

In the two weeks since medical examiner Dr. Sara Linton joined her lover, agent Will Trent, on the payroll of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, everything’s been fine, except of course for Will’s uneasy sense that Angie Polaski, the long-estranged wife he just can’t get around to divorcing, will never let him alone. How right he is. A Glock found near the scene of a grisly murder is quickly traced to Angie. Now Amanda Wagner, the GBI deputy director who mercilessly rides Will and his partner, Faith Mitchell, wants to know what Angie had to do with the death of Dale Harding, a thoroughly miserable human being who was a detective with the Atlanta PD. The case is already a minefield: the murder scene, drenched in blood that isn’t Harding’s, is the construction site of the All Star, a nightclub owned by basketball star Marcus Rippy, who’s well-known to Will as the man who raped Keisha Miscavage and, thanks to his feral manager, Kip Kilpatrick, and an army of lawyers, walked away two weeks ago without so much as a summons. The forensic evidence indicates that at least one other person was seriously wounded at the murder scene before vanishing. Forget about indicting Rippy for the crime; Will would be lucky to interview him. Just when it seems that Will’s ties to the case couldn’t become more fraught, Slaughter interrupts the action for a hundred-page flashback to the week before the killing. Things get clearer but no less tense.

Middling for a matchless series (Unseen, 2013, etc.) in which, just as in grand opera, nothing ordinary ever happens.