AFTER THAT NIGHT

Another violent crime in Atlanta provokes another deep dive into the tormented past of Slaughter’s regulars.

Three years after Dani Cooper, 19, crashes into an ambulance, gets taken to Grady Memorial Hospital, mutters to pediatrician/medical examiner Sara Linton that she thinks she’s been raped, and then dies, Thomas Michael McAllister IV is placed on trial for her assault. Since Sara’s the only person who heard Dani’s gasping recollection, she’s the star witness, and she fully expects Douglas Fanning—the sharklike lawyer retained by pediatric surgeon Mac McAllister and his wife, Britt, to protect their well-sheltered son—to force her to testify about her own rape 15 years ago, which resulted in an ectopic pregnancy that ended any chance she might have had of bearing children. Fanning drills Sara unmercifully but doesn’t bring up her history. Even more surprisingly, Britt McAllister, when Sara encounters her in the courthouse restroom, smugly informs her: “What happened to you. What happened to Dani. It’s all connected.” Indeed it is, and in order to work out the connections, Sara, who identified her rapist as janitor Jack Allen Wright, will have to work with her fiance, Will Trent, and his partner, Faith Mitchell of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, to dig deeper. Their goal: to figure out which fellow medical student who attended a fateful mixer all those years ago—a group Sara’s now come to think of as the Rape Club—was behind the assault on Dani and a potentially endless list of other victims. These horrors may seem too unspeakable to pin down to any one perpetrator. It’s a signal achievement of Slaughter that the climactic revelations add still another layer of horror to her tale.

A grueling, pitiless, yet compassionate anatomy of rape for readers who can take it.