Karin Slaughter | Snatched (Will Trent #5.5)

The Book:

Snatched by Karin Slaughter
Published May 14, 2012 by Dell
Date re-read: April 23, 2023

The Characters:

Will Trent, GBI agent

Faith Mitchell, Atlanta PD detective
Amanda Wagner, Will’s boss

The Plot (from Goodreads):

Will Trent, a dedicated agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for fifteen years, knows that there’s definitely such a thing as a cop’s intuition. Which is why he should have listened to his own.

While in an airport restroom at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International, Will overhears a girl’s pleading, plaintive voice: “Please, I wanna go home.” Something isn’t right here, thinks Will. He feels it in his gut. But he waits too long to act, and now the girl and the anxious, angry man she’s with have disappeared into the crowds at the busiest passenger airport in the world.

After a desperate search and with time running out, Will makes a call to his supervisor, Amanda Wagner. Will’s partner, Faith Mitchell, immediately sends out an abducted child alert. The entire airport will soon be grinding to a halt: Almost 100 million passengers a year. Five runways. Seven concourses. Six million square feet of space that sprawled across two counties, three cities, and five jurisdictions. All shut down on a dime because Will has a hunch that he is certain is true: a girl, maybe six or seven years old, has been snatched from God knows where. And he intends to bring her back—no matter what it takes.

Click here for book spoilers for Snatched

Book spoilers ahead–if you haven’t yet read Snatched, I suggest you turn back now.

Will got assigned airport sex trafficking duty because he didn’t get his hair cut when Amanda asked.

The Reveal:

Will tricked the kidnapper by moving his watch ahead until the kidnapper thought the next handoff of Abigail had passed. Once Will’s watch reached 7pm, the kidnapper was ready to make a deal. Vanessa Livingston drew up paperwork that said he would not be prosecuted by the city of Atlanta or the town they were in, but they called the sheriff of the neighboring town (which the airport was also a part of) to get him arrested as well as the FBI and GBI. Abigail and her mother were reunited.