This is Why We Lied (Will Trent, #12)

by Karin Slaughter

“I know what you’re going to say,” Sara told him. “This is why we lied.”

There were secrets that would destroy Dave. Revelations that would tear Fish apart. Crimes that could send Bitty to prison. And the sheer evil that Papa had committed to keep this place in his violent, greedy hands. None of them were going to take the lodge away from Mercy. They would have to kill her first.

And then Mercy had realized that what had happened to Dave when he was a child didn’t matter. What mattered was the hell he put her through now that he was an adult. His need was the bottomless hole in the quicksand.

All your life, you make everybody feel so goddam little cause that’s the only way you can make yourself feel big.”

Strangulation was a giant red flag. At least that was what Mercy had read online. When a man put his hands around a woman’s neck, that woman was six times more likely to suffer serious violence or die by homicide.

Or he could be related to the young woman that Mercy had killed seventeen years ago. Her name had been Gabriella, but her family had called her Gabbie.

She could sneak up on you like a ghost. Or Death, depending on her mood.

“Listen up, girl.” Bitty jabbed her finger in Mercy’s face. “You keep up these threats, somebody’s gonna put a knife in your back.”

“When I come for somebody, I look them in the eye.”

Shitty men were like periods. Once you had your first one, your life was consumed by dread or panic over when it would show up again.

She also knew Georgia would be Mississippi without metro Atlanta’s tax dollars. Everybody romanticized country living until they needed internet and healthcare.

Homicide was the leading cause of maternal death in the United States.

Roughly eighty percent of the murders Will investigated were perpetrated by men who were furious about their inability to control women.