The Kept Woman

The Kept Woman is a novel by the American writer Karin Slaughter, published in 2016 and one of her books about the Georgia investigator Will Trent.

Will has a difficult history and a habit of keeping his private life away from his work, and the case puts the two together in the worst possible way: the owner of the warehouse is the man his ex-wife married, and an investigation into that man has been running for months. Sara Linton, the medical examiner, is also part of the story, and what she finds at the scene ties the dead officer to a woman who has been missing from Will's life for years. Slaughter writes with attention to procedure and to the relationships among the investigators, and the plot turns on how much each of them is willing to tell the others.

It is one of the later novels in the series, and it depends on events from the earlier books without being limited to them; the private history of the investigators carries as much of the plot as the evidence does.