Indelible

Indelible is a thriller by Karin Slaughter, published in 2004. It is set in Grant County, Georgia, where Jeffrey Tolliver is chief of police and Sara Linton is the medical examiner, and it opens with a shooting inside the police station itself.

An officer is shot at point-blank range and Jeffrey is wounded, which turns the building into the scene of a hostage situation and puts Sara at the middle of it. Nobody outside knows who the shooter is or what he wants, and the standoff cannot be resolved by waiting for him to give himself up. Sara, as the county's medical examiner, is at the centre of the crisis rather than on its edge.

Working from outside the station, Lena Adams, newly reinstated to the force, and Frank Wallace, Jeffrey's second in command, try to establish who the shooter is and find a way in before Jeffrey's wounds kill him. The case turns out to be the working out of something begun long before, which is why the people inside the building are not the only ones being held to account for it.