Karin Slaughter | The Last Widow (Will Trent #9)

The Book:

The Last Widow by Karin Slaughter (Will Trent #9); 2019

The Characters:

GBI Special Agent Will Trent and Dr. Sara Linton; GBI Special Agent Faith Mitchell, Deputy Director Amanda Wagner

The Plot:

Will and Sara are hanging out at Sara’s mom’s house when they hear an explosion coming from the nearby campus. They head to the scene, knowing they’ll be called in sooner or later anyways.

On their way, they pass a car crash with multiple injuries. When they stop to help they realize the accident is staged. A fight breaks out between Will and the men from the car. Will is injured and Sara is kidnapped.

Will finds out that she was taken by a white extremist group (who caused the explosion) and goes undercover to get her back, racing the clock before she is killed.

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How did The Last Widow end?

Click here for book spoilers

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

The group that abducted Sara was the Invisible Patriot Army, IPA. They were tangentially related to Martin Novak, but the storyline never really came back around to him. The leader of the IPA, Dash, was Novak’s successor and had married his wife. Nothing came to pass with Novak’s complicated prisoner transport, though.

The IPA was a white supremacy group/cult. They had a measles outbreak, so a doctor was the perfect hostage to help their sick children. Sara was their prisoner but came to care for the kids. Will found a way to go undercover and infiltrate the group to find her. Dash invited Will to eat dinner with his family the night before their attack, which was when Will found Sara. He wasn’t able to rescue her, though.

Dash had a plan to shoot up the Georgia state house as well as release botulism on some airline flights in the food. Undercover Will was brought on to be part of the attack–this part felt a bit rushed to me. Dash had been training a militia, and takes the undercover Will with them to attack the Georgia state capitol building. Will shoots Dash’s men, but many innocent people die as well. There is a standoff between Will, Dash, and a teenage kid that was part of the militia. Will shoots (but doesn’t kill) Dash so that Amanda can arrest him.

Sara had woken up the day of the attack to find the camp eerily empty. When she realized her sentry was dead, she was able to break out of the cabin she was being kept in. All of Dash’s children and the women at the camp had died of botulism poisoning. Dash had left Sara alive as a witness to his message. Sara found a phone to call Faith and tell her about what the group had been planning.

The Ending:

During the epilogue, Will and Sara discuss moving in together. However, in classic Sara and Will miscommunication, wires get crossed and the conversation doesn’t go exactly right. Will flips it around and talks about marriage, but Sara isn’t sure whether he really proposed.

Title:

Dash tells Sara that she will be “the last widow of her kind”, meaning the last to have her husband killed by criminals in the line of duty.

The Review:

I started reading the Will Trent books in 2018, and had just gotten through them all in time to read The Last Widow just as it came out. You can imagine how disappointed I was for my months-long binge of Will and Sara’s relationship to come to an end! It kills me that I now have to wait months for The Silent Wife, but at least there’s another in the pipeline.

The Last Widow was interesting compared to the other books in the series in that we got to see all the main characters working the same case from different sides. I enjoyed how all the different viewpoints came together to save the day.

I’m always so impressed with how Karin Slaughter handles complicated topics, in this case that of white supremacy. I can’t help thinking that her research for this book must have been terrifying, learning about these groups and their goals.

Read The Last Widow? Check out my discussion on The Silent Wife next.