A hostage crisis sends medical examiner Sara Lintonhurtling through a maze of memories to a nightmare from her earliest days with her ex-husband, Grant County police chief Jeffrey Tolliver.
The two young men who enter the Grant County police station—just as the morning shift is beginning—work with military precision, killing and wounding several officers and visiting schoolchildren and subduing a jittery patrolman, an elderly secretary, and the medical examiner. When their escape route is cut off, they methodically secure the building and keep the gathering crowd of law enforcement officials at bay. Realizing at length that Jeffrey has been the target of this bloodbath, both the feds outside the station and Sara (A Faint Cold Fear, 2003, etc.), trapped inside, struggle to figure out who hated the Chief enough to create such havoc. Through a series of extended flashbacks to a trip Sara and dangerously sexy Jeffrey took from Georgia to his hometown of Sylacauga, Alabama, Slaughter hints at the roots of the devastation: the night Jeffrey’s old school friend Robert killed an intruder in his home and Jeffrey helped him work out a plausible story, a story Sara knew even then was bogus.
Amazingly, Slaughter manages between past and present stories while maintaining suspense in both by the simple device of showing the pettiest, most everyday conflicts imaginable constantly in danger of exploding in violence.