Beyond Reach by Karin Slaughter

I was excited to read Beyond Reach, the final book of the Grant Country series. I have put a lot of time into these books, lots of emotions, and I was ready to see how it was all going to tie together. Unfortunately, I felt more like I was reading the synopsis for a bad soap opera.

(Source: Kelsey Darling)

Sara Linton and Jeffrey Tolliver have finally gotten re-married and are looking into adoption; Lena has finally gotten out from under the thumb of Ethan Green and is taking a well deserved vacation. Life should be great. However, Sara is suffering through a malpractice suit and Jeffrey has just gotten a call that Lena has been arrested and is a suspect in the murder of an unknown person. In an extremely small town with little resources, it is up to Sara and Jeffrey to use their own time to figure out what Lena has gotten herself involved in, and hope that they can get out of it as well.

There are a few issues I have with this book, but it has been building for a bit. Really, I think I should have stopped reading after the fourth one. It was after this point that a few things happened.

(Source: Giphy)

The big thing is the content really dropped. You see this happen in a lot of longer series. How much bad stuff can continuously happen to a group of people? Across all six books, Jeffrey was shot twice, shot a 13 year old girl, held hostage, and is eventually killed by a bomb; Sara was targeted by a murderer, held hostage twice, faced a malpractice suit, and loses her husband; and Lena was held hostage twice, had her sister brutally murdered, lost her job and got it back, and entered into and left a relationship with an abusive Nazi. On there own, these are all good plots. Together though, it sounds like The Young and the Restless. I honestly wouldn't have been surprised if Jeffrey somehow survived the bomb blast if there was a seventh book in the series (I know that after this, Sara shows up in the Will Trent series and is a widow, but if that series never came about, I can almost guarantee Jeffrey would be alive by some bizarre miracle). One thing that I usually like about detective series is that they are all different cases that, while impact the detective, aren't life altering to this extent. Here, all of the cases bleed so much into their lives and physically involve them, even Sara who shouldn't be this involved except in the cases where she needs to be the coroner. It just isn't plausible.

On the subject of Jeffrey's death and Sara's involvement, there is a second issue. I read six books just so Jeffrey could die?! Are you kidding me? It's McDreamy all over again. I remember when Shonda Rhimes killed off Patrick Dempsy's character, she said something like Derek and Meredith couldn't just live forever as a happy married couple, that would get boring, and now that they were married and there were kids involved, they couldn't just get divorced, so one of them had to go, and you can't kill off the titular character. I disagreed with that. We spend I don't know how many seasons of Grey's Anatomy rooting for those two just to watch Derek get hit by a truck and die after saving others. Not all of the characters have to constantly be in drama with their loved ones, and there are other dramas besides death and divorce she could have explored. That is how I feel here. We spent six book watching them fall back in love, realizing they were always each others "one," just for Jeffrey to die by a freaking bomb. Give us one thing, Slaughter!

(Source: Giphy)

Another big issue that I had with plot development is Lena's mother and her uncle Hank. For five books, Lena's mother has been dead and Hank has been a recovered drug addict who proudly runs a bar and never touches a drop because he is the reason the Lena's sister Sybil became blinded at a young age. And yet, now Angela (the mother) is alive, she was the one who got Hank addicted to meth, she blinded Sybil, and then ran away, but not really because she was living at the town motel and serves as its cleaning lady. Lena was old enough to remember the accident, but not remember that her mom was driving the car. Even a childhood friend knew this detail. I could maybe understand the lie if the girls had been to young to form memories, but that's not the case. I know that you can convince yourself of anything, but this would have been Hank convincing two people of something, which would be an amazing show of gas lighting if possible. But still, how do you convince a small town to never mention this woman again, even if you can convince Lena and Sybil to forget her.

This kind of leads into my next issue: time. In the first four books, there are distinct measures. It's been three months since that happened, nine months since that happened, etc. By the end of book four, it should be about a year and a half since the start of the first book. And yet, at the start of book six, it's been six years since Sybil died, but only two years since Jeffrey arrested Ethan at the end of book five. None of the timing added up. I know I suck at keeping track of time and what happened when; I'm lucky if I can tell you what I had for breakfast when I leave for lunch. But this was all over the place and it made it very hard to follow a timeline.

(Source: Giphy)

I feel like at the end of the series, Lena was really given the short end of the stick. No one really got a happy ending at the end of the series, but at no point in any of the books did Lena get something good. The events that happened to her was almost as if Slaughter hated her. I don't know if Slaughter wanted the readers to hate her, but I really related with her, even though I did not agree with her provoking her Nazi ex, but I think that it's more because that I feel like that plot was a bit forced from the beginning (again because I think Slaughter hates Lena and want to make her unlikable).

By the end of this book, I was really just glad that it was all over. These characters that I had grown to love became annoying, even ones that played minor roles, like Sara's parents. Everything was feeling forced and not true to the characters, and I feel like that was really highlighted in this book especially. I honestly can't say if I would read the Will Trent series at this point. Between the last two books, I have come to really resent the series, which makes me sad after all the love I had for the first and fourth books.

Rating: 5/10
Author: Karin Slaughter
Series: Grant County (Book 6 of 6)
Genres: Mystery, Thriller, Crime
Dates Read: February 19-21, 2020