WATCH WILL TRENT ON ABC!
"Expect from a Karin Slaughter crime thriller . . . just the right amount of twists, turns, shocks, surprises and domestic thrill and shrill." — Parade
The instant NYT bestseller featuring Will Trent and Sara Linton from Karin Slaughter, author of Pretty Girls and After that Night!
One toxic family. Eight suspicious guests. Everyone is guilty...But who is a killer?
For GBI investigator Will Trent and medical examiner Sara Linton, McAlpine Lodge seems like the ideal getaway to celebrate their honeymoon. Set on a gorgeous, off-the-grid mountaintop property, it's the perfect place to unplug and reconnect. Until a bone-chilling scream cuts through the night.
A murderer in their midst
Mercy McAlpine, the manager of the Lodge, is dead. With a vicious storm raging and the one access road to the property washed out, the murderer must be someone on the mountain. But as Will and Sara investigate the McAlpine family and the other guests, they realize that everyone here is lying....Lying about their past. Lying to their family. Lying to themselves.
Who killed Mercy McAlpine?
It soon becomes clear that normal rules don't apply at McAlpine Lodge, and Will and Sara are going to have to watch their step at every turn. Trapped on the resort, they must untangle a decades-old web of secrets to discover what happened to Mercy. And with the killer poised to strike again, the trip of a lifetime becomes a race against the clock...
WATCH WILL TRENT ON ABC!
"Expect from a Karin Slaughter crime thriller . . . just the right amount of twists, turns, shocks, surprises and domestic thrill and shrill." — Parade
The instant NYT bestseller featuring Will Trent and Sara Linton from Karin Slaughter, author of Pretty Girls and After that Night!
One toxic family. Eight suspicious guests. Everyone is guilty...But who is a killer?
For GBI investigator Will Trent and medical examiner Sara Linton, McAlpine Lodge seems like the ideal getaway to celebrate their honeymoon. Set on a gorgeous, off-the-grid mountaintop property, it's the perfect place to unplug and reconnect. Until a bone-chilling scream cuts through the night.
A murderer in their midst
Mercy McAlpine, the manager of the Lodge, is dead. With a vicious storm raging and the one access road to the property washed out, the murderer must be someone on the mountain. But as Will and Sara investigate the McAlpine family and the other guests, they realize that everyone here is lying....Lying about their past. Lying to their family. Lying to themselves.
Who killed Mercy McAlpine?
It soon becomes clear that normal rules don't apply at McAlpine Lodge, and Will and Sara are going to have to watch their step at every turn. Trapped on the resort, they must untangle a decades-old web of secrets to discover what happened to Mercy. And with the killer poised to strike again, the trip of a lifetime becomes a race against the clock...
Reviews-
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June 3, 2024
A honeymoon turns into a grisly locked-room mystery in Slaughter’s harrowing 12th outing for Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Will Trent (following After That Night). Will and his bride, medical examiner Sara Linton, plan to celebrate at McAlpine Lodge in northwest Georgia, but on the night they arrive, hotel manager Mercy McAlpine is murdered in one of the property’s cabins. Will and Sara jump into action, first turning their suspicion toward Mercy’s abusive ex-husband, whom Will knows from the time they spent together in an Atlanta boy’s home. As Will and Sarah continue to poke around, however, other suspects come into focus, including Mercy’s hot-tempered father and ice-cold mother, who hope to force a sale of the lodge, and a guest who has intimate knowledge of Mercy’s criminal past. After Will’s Bureau of Investigation colleagues show up, the body count rises, and Will unearths some unspeakable secrets within the McAlpine clan. The subject matter gets almost operatically bleak, but Slaughter saves the day with her gifts for suspense and characterization—Mercy, in particular, makes an impression. This long-running series still has gas in the tank. Agent: Victoria Sanders, Victoria Sanders & Assoc. -
Starred review from June 1, 2024
Will Trent and Sara Linton have barely arrived for their honeymoon at McAlpine Lodge when screams lead them to lodge manager Mercy McAlpine, who has been savagely stabbed. She whispers her last words in Will's arms. Will, who has been struggling with the loss of his mother, now must deliver Mercy's message to her teenage son and secure the scene for local police. But Sheriff Biscuits Hartshorne has already pinned Mercy's murder on her abusive ex-husband, Dave, and isn't interested in investigating. Will knows what Dave is capable of. Dave was called "the Jackal" in the group home in which they were placed as kids. But why would he kill Mercy now? Alternative motives abound. Mercy threatened to reveal family secrets that would derail plans to sell the lodge, her brother's creepy friend Chuck was obsessed with her, and the lodge's other guests are throwing up a myriad of red flags. The sheer number of motives should stretch credulity, but Slaughter's skillfully nuanced portrayal of the investigation, exposing abuse, manipulation, and desperate greed, creates a disturbingly realistic page-turner. This bar-raiser for the classic locked-room mystery is in good company with Sarah Pearse's The Sanitorium (2021), Adrian McKinty's The Island (2022), and One by One, by Ruth Ware (2020).COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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August 15, 2024
Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Will Trent and medical examiner Sara Linton honeymoon at a family lodge that includes breathtaking landscapes, varied guests, troubled family dynamics, and murder. McAlpine Family Lodge manager Mercy McAlpine has been an outcast within her family ever since Dave McAlpine, an orphan whom her parents adopted, got her pregnant at 15. To her enduring shame, her relatives, from her aunt Delilah to her own brother, Christopher, took Dave to their hearts even as they squeezed her out, snatching baby Jon from her to be raised mostly by Delilah. Sixteen years later, when her father, Cecil, plans to sell the lodge whose operation Mercy's poured herself into, she's had enough, and evidently so have they. Hours after she announces her intention to ruin the lives of any family members who vote with Cecil to sell the place to Max Brouwer and Sydney Flynn for $12 million, Will finds her fatally stabbed near Lake McAlpine, and she dies in his arms. The half-dozen other guests are icing on the cake, since every one of Mercy's relatives had a powerful motive to kill her. The honeymoon isn't exactly over, but Will tells Sara he'd be committed to investigating even if Chuck, the fellow guest who tormented Will in the orphanage where they both grew up, weren't on hand as Christopher's lecherous best friend. The high-octane story inevitably lags when Faith Mitchell, Will's partner in the GBI, arrives to question the suspects, but the shattering climax reveals that the McAlpine family is even more dysfunctional than you imagined. One character nails it: This is "an Agatha Christie locked-room mystery with a VC Andrews twist."COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
