The Grant County backstory is in "Indelible" by Karin Slaughter.

Indelible, the fourth novel in Karin Slaughter’s Grant County series, takes Dr. Sara Linton and Chief Jeffrey Tolliver back more than a decade to the time before they married. Though the contemporary action is set in Grant County after their divorce, flashbacks to that earlier time are the key to understanding their difficult and complicated relationship, their distinctive personalities, and the action that takes place in the present. Once again, Slaughter succeeds in crafting a compelling thriller with all the requisite elements of suspense, terror, and violence.

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Karin Slaughter’s Grant County

I would hope that the proliferation of violent crime that takes place in Slaughter’s fictional Grant County, Georgia, doesn’t reflect reality. There’s a whole lot of it. The county’s population is centered in three small towns. Sara Linton’s pediatric practice and morgue and Jeffrey Tolliver’s police department are located in one of the three, a place called Heartsdale. The two characters dominate the series, which also includes a passel of familiar lesser characters, each of whom seems to get into trouble (often fatal trouble) in one of the books.

In Indelible, though lesser characters figure prominently in the story, the focus is on Sara and Jeffrey throughout. In a scene set in contemporary time, the two are caught up in a shootout in the police station. Meanwhile, flashbacks project them far into the past as Jeffrey takes Sara back to his hometown in Alabama to introduce her to the troubled past he normally keeps hidden. As always with Slaughter’s novels, the plotting is complex and tight and the story engaging. Sara Linton and Jeffrey Tolliver are two people we care about.

Indelible (Grant County #4) by Karin Slaughter (2009) 368 pages ★★★★☆

About the author

Karin Slaughter has been an international bestselling crime writer since 2001, when the first novel in her Grant County series, Blindsighted, appeared to rave reviews. She has written six novels in that series, the last of them in 2007, ten in the more current Will Trent series, and six other books, the last of which (in 2015) was the outstanding standalone novel, Pretty Girls. She lives in Georgia, where both series are set.

For the full list of the books in this series, go to Karin Slaughter’s well-crafted series of Grant County thrillers.

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