Karen Slaughter’s standalone novels Cop Town and Pretty Girls were exciting page turners, and now she returns to the ‘Will Trent’ series with The Kept Woman, which, not to put too fine a point on it, reads more like a soap opera with guns than a thriller.

Will Trent, a damaged agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and his partner, Faith, are called out to a murder at a half-built club belonging to a basketball player they had unsuccessfully tried to prosecute for rape. The body belongs to a dirty ex-cop, and there is a lot of blood – but it didn’t come from the corpse. The blood, it turns out, belongs to Will’s toxic wife, Angie. This discovery sends Will on a frantic quest to find her, despite the on/off nature of their relationship and the fact that he is supposed to be getting a divorce so he can marry his new girlfriend, medical examiner Sara Linton.

The story doesn’t get any less tangled, but it gets more lurid as it flicks back and forward in time. We learn of Angie’s quest to rescue the daughter she abandoned at birth from the daughter’s abusive husband, and of Angie’s attempt to free herself from the man who pimped her out as a child.

The Kept Woman is a lurid melodrama that isn’t quite serious, or tongue in cheek enough to really satisfy on any level

Reviewed by Tessa Chudy