Gender Violence Packaged As Entertainment: The Silent Wife

The Silent Wife by Karin Slaughter

Harper Collins

Pp. 476

This is the tenth novel in the Will Trent series and comes with an expectation that the reader knows and cares about these characters. Without the prior knowledge, that’s a pretty hard sell. In an author’s note at the end, Karin Slaughter claims she writes love stories. “Really gritty, violent love stories, but still.” If love stories come with lashings of violence against women, then we might have to accept this claim, but it is depressing and disturbing for all that. The basic premise is that a man kidnaps women, leaves them drugged and immobilised, then returns to repeatedly rape them – he is found and imprisoned, but ten years later (while he is still in prison) similar crimes start up again – did they get the wrong man?

The novel alternates between times frames and returns to the cold case, which featured all the same characters but in different roles. Then, Jeffrey was investigating the case and was married to Sara. Now, Jeffrey is dead, and Will is in charge of the case with his professional partner, Faith. Will is romantically linked with Sara, the medical examiner. If there were mistakes made in the previous case, Will tries to shield Sara from errors her husband might have made. There were also glaring oversights made by Lena (such as assuming the victim was dead when she wasn’t), for which Sara cannot forgive her. Lena is still in action and pregnant, and this seems to rankle everyone, which indicates they are suffering serious trauma from a past the other books might explain if there were any interest in finding out.

In 2018 The Staunch Prize was introduced for the best thriller ‘in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered’. The founder, author and screenwriter Bridget Lawless, went on to say, “As violence against women in fiction reaches a ridiculous high, the Staunch Book Prize invites thriller writers to keep us on the edge of our seats without resorting to the same old cliches – particularly female characters who are sexually assaulted (however ‘necessary to the plot’) or done away with (however ‘ingeniously’).” It closed in 2022. Not enough entries? Some claimed it was a ‘gag order’ and the case for violence against women should be raised and addressed through fiction, even if these tropes are used as entertainment.

The Silent Wife is worth considering in this light. It begins with a woman running through the woods being stalked by a man who will brutally assault her. Rape and violence towards women are central to this novel, written by a woman. Will feels the need to point out that all rape victims are different. Might that be because they are human beings as well as ‘victims’? “Some were angry. Some entered into a fugue state. Some wanted revenge. Most desperately wanted to leave. A few had even laughed when they told their stories. He had noted the same unpredictable affects among veterans returning from war. Trauma was trauma. Every person reacted differently.”

Of course, there are plenty of police procedural tropes throughout the novel with that hard-bitten tougher-than-nails attitude Americans like to portray. One can almost hear the actors barking out the empty words on interchangeable TV programs NCIS/ CSI /SVU such as, “We don’t have bodies or crime scenes. We have guesses and a spreadsheet. The families deserve answers and this is the only way to get them.” Cops go undercover and put themselves in danger with hidden microphones seeking a confession that will result in a death penalty. They maintain that tough exterior with flippant wisecracks.

The novel is fast paced with characters superficially caring about the victims. The reader is supposed to care about the characters. It’s hard to differentiate any of them from each other, and the dialogue is written with an eye to the TV adaptation. It leaves a sensation of empty fatigue and a knowledge that as long as people are entertained by this style of violence, it will continue. The consumer may pretend to be horrified, but by treating this as a titivation, we are part of the problem.