The Last Widow

June 24, 2019
In bestseller Slaughter’s harrowing seventh novel featuring Sara Linton and her boyfriend, Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Will Trent (after 2016’s The Kept Woman), Sara and Will are visiting her family in the Atlanta suburbs when explosions rock nearby Emory University. As the couple heads toward campus, they encounter a multiple-car accident. Sara stops to offer medical assistance and discovers that one vehicle contains several armed men—two with gunshot wounds—and a traumatized woman she recognizes as missing CDC epidemiologist Michelle Spivey. After a brutal fight that injures Will, the men take Sara and flee. Will is certain that Sara’s kidnappers bombed Emory, and intelligence suggests the men are part of a paramilitary group that’s planning something catastrophic. With the clock ticking, Will and his partner, Faith Mitchell, scramble to follow bread crumbs left by a terrified but determined Sara. Vivid characters and rapidly escalating stakes complement the riveting, adrenaline-fueled plot. Along the way, Slaughter examines such topics as misogyny, white nationalism, and the politicization of law enforcement. Thriller fans will devour this visceral, gratifying entry. Author tour. Agent: Victoria Sanders, Victoria Sanders & Assoc.

July 1, 2019
Pediatrician/medical examiner Sara Linton's path to marrying Will Trent, of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, runs into apocalyptic obstacles only Slaughter could devise. To begin with, Sara's mother objects so strenuously to Will that she won't even utter his name. But her opposition can't compete with the carnage that erupts when Sara and Will (The Kept Woman, 2016, etc.), hearing the sounds of a bomb near Emory University, rush to the scene and encounter along the way the aftermath of a three-car collision. Stopping to help, they soon smell something amiss, but not soon enough to prevent them from being overpowered and separated by the supposed victims. Will is beaten to the ground; Sara is whisked off in a car whose occupants include Michelle Spivey, a scientist with the Centers for Disease Control who was abducted from under her young daughter's nose a month ago. Arriving at the mountain encampment of the Invisible Patriot Army, a paramilitary cadre determined to make America white again, Sara is first forced to treat the wounds of the men who kidnapped her and then asked by IPA leader Dash to remain so that she can treat an outbreak of measles that's swept through the children in the camp, including Dash's daughter, whose mother is Gwen Novak, the daughter of Martin Novak, whose history of anti-government bank robberies has made him a high-value federal prisoner. As Will schemes to infiltrate the camp disguised as a new recruit, Sara is dismayed to find that no matter what she does, the children she's tending keep getting sicker and sicker. Even the most ardent fans of Slaughter's white-hot thrillers (Pieces of Her, 2018, etc.) will be shocked and horror-stricken by the outrage Dash has planned. All the emotional intensity Slaughter's readers expect, now focused on a diabolical domestic terrorist. Don't say you weren't warned.

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Starred review from July 1, 2019
The latest entry in the Will Trent series (and the first since The Kept Woman, 2016) is cause for celebration by fans of Slaughter, in particular, and of crime fiction in general. A month after Michelle Spivey, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control, is kidnapped, explosions are set off at Emory University. Arriving at the scene, Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) agent Will Trent and Sara Linton, GBI medical examiner and Will's lover, are stopped at an odd accident scene, where attackers assault Will and abduct Sara. Bereft at his failure to stop the attack and still in severe pain, Will perseveres to do whatever it takes to save Sara. But he's up against the Invisible Patriot Army (IPA), a paramilitary white nationalist group led by a pedophile known as Dash, who plans to send a message to the nation that will cause countless casualties. As the narrative moves between law-enforcement officers and the secluded IPA camp, and time becomes critical, the depth of the relationship between Will and Sara is also vividly portrayed. With familiar characters, further developed here, and a plot as timely as it is riveting, Slaughter's latest will enthrall her ever-growing legion of fans.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Slaughter's thrillers have become near-automatic best-sellers, and this is one of her best.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

July 12, 2019

Things are never easy for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's Will Trent and Sara Linton, the bureau's newish medical examiner and Will's lover. Now they battle an evil group intent on launching a deadly epidemic. Fans have waited three years for the next Will Trent title, so there will be clamor; with a 250,000-copy first printing.

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