Constant Reader February 2025: Cop Town by Karin Slaughter

A Stand-Alone By A Mystery Writer Should Be Required Reading for Those Who Don’t Think Policing — And America — Are Capable Of Change

If you’re a fan of my television criticism you know what a huge fan I am of ABC’s Will Trent. It has regularly made my top ten list in the first two seasons. It has been on the air and very well may do so this season. You will also know that I am a huge fan of the Karin Slaughter novels that have inspired the series as well as her earlier works that dealt with Sara Linton — and how her life would intersect with Will Trent’s.

I may at some point write about her work involving either character but I thought it would be fitting to start with what was her first stand-alone novel. Like so many other great mystery writers such as Laura Lippman and Dennis Lehane, Slaughter is also known for writing standalones that take place in her home town — in Slaughter’s case, Atlanta. Some of those novels such as The Kept Woman have been adapted to Netflix. Cop Town was her first attempt at a standalone in 2014 as well as her first attempt at a period piece. I’d argue it should be required reading for those who even loathe mystery novels because 1) she wrote it when the level of activism around police shootings was started to become a movement and 2) it stands at the biggest argument to anyone who wants to argue that America is, when it comes to everything on the progressive wish list it’s exactly the same as was during the founder’s time and we haven’t changed at all. Cop Town couldn’t make this counterargument any louder if it tried, and that Slaughter, who has been fundamentally fair in her portrayal of policing and all of the many flaws it has in a contemporary setting, sets her novel in November of 1974 to make it very clear just how much worse it was even forty years ago.

And its worth noting Slaughter’s novels are firmly focused on female protagonists even more than males. We see it in the Will Trent novels which spend as much time from Faith Mitchell and Angie Pulaski’s point of view in the early books and then move on to Sara Linton’s when she joins the series. Indeed with the sole exception of Trent, most of the critical characters in the novel are women, including Amanda Wagner his martinet like boss at the GBI. (She’s African-American in the series but fundamentally there are few differences either in her personality in either portrayal.) Indeed Amanda Wagner started out at the Atlanta PD along with Faith Mitchell’s mother roughly the same time as Cop Town takes place and the majority of the novel is told from the perspective of two very different female officers: Maggie Lawson, a young woman who comes from a family of generations of cops and Kate Murphy, a widow whose husband died in Vietnam and who is trying to find a way to make herself useful and stop mourning.

Maggie ended up becoming an officer over the intense objections of her father Terry Lawson, a man who has been beating and abusing every female in the family for so long Maggie can’t remember a time she wasn’t being battered. Her brother Jimmy is the golden boy in the family and Maggie, like all women in Terry’s circle — which includes the worst aspects of the Atlanta police department — is considered a disappointment because she isn’t already married and popping out kids. Maggie clearly did so in order to try and find an escape hatch from her horrible life where the true horrors become clear very quickly only to find that she’s traded one hell for another. Terry is such a bastard that it’s clear that all of them only hang out with him these days because Jimmy is the Golden Boy, the high school athlete who was supposed to get out before an injury sidelined him. Now he’s part of the Atlanta PD and in the prologue we see him basically carry his partner into the hospital, even though his head as been blown off his shoulders.

Maggie suspects that the person behind this is The Shooter: someone who has been killing cops for several months in Atlanta. The moment she tries to raise this to her uncle she is both browbeaten and nearly physically attacked. Terry knows whose responsible: it’s a black man and he and the squad are going to hunt him down. Terry doesn’t care about who shot Don or even his nephew. He’s obsessing over the fact that his partner was killing after hours several months ago (when he was seeing a prostitute). They found the suspect and Terry found evidence that implicated him. Rather than run he turned himself in and made it very clear that he’d been framed.

During this period Maynard Jackson has been elected the first African-American Mayor in the South. He has made good on his promise to bring diversity to the local government. “Which was good or bad depending on how you look at it.” In the eyes of the Atlanta PD it’s bad because an all-black jury was empaneled and the killer walked free. Terry has been spending all of his time trying to track the killer down and deliver the kind of justice that used to be handled with a lynching — and its clear just from listening to Terry and his friends talk they wish it was still in style. As Slaughter points out when she walks into the Atlanta PD: “They kept their Klan robes hanging in the back of their closets.” When Jimmy is killed they make it very clear that this won’t happen “Only walk he’s taking is to the grave.”

Maggie doesn’t like one bit of the discussion — which is going on the moment she walks into the PD and doesn’t quiet for a moment — but she believes in the blue wall. Of course she also knows the brass wouldn’t listen to her anyway: “She was also a woman. No one would listen to her.” But she knows there are roles in Jimmy’s story from the moment it starts.

Cop Town makes it very clear that in the 1970s the gender divides and racial divides in Atlanta are still very blatant. When Kate Murphy shows up in the patrol room in a uniform that barely fits no one offers to help her but they all start taking bets on how quickly she’ll wash out. Similarly the older female officers on the job are in a sense, just as toxic as the men are towards the younger women, using their authority to push their burdens on the younger patrol officers, just as frequently getting drunk on the job and openly having affairs with other officers even if they are married as well. African-American officers have power in this unit but they will be just as brutal on their own race when a pimp is cutting up people in the streets. And African-American women who are undercover look down on the white female officers with the same hostility.

Slaughter makes it very clear that the white power structure in the Atlanta PD is clearly doing everything in its power to make sure the attempts for diversity by Jackson fail. The uniforms the female officers are given are male uniforms and they have to have them tailed themselves, the locker room used to be a men’s bathroom and is still just as filthy; genitalia is tattooed there every day, crossed out, and put there again. Lawson has been on the job just long enough to think that things will never change. Murphy has gotten in at the deep end and doesn’t know any better.

There are no secrets in the Atlanta PD and Kate finds that out quickly even though she’s doing everything in her power to keep hers. We learn not only that she comes from a family of immense privilege but she is Jewish in a very racist town — and her mother and grandmother survived the Holocaust. She spends her days since she was widowed in an upper scale Atlanta hotel — she hasn’t been able to go to her former home since her husband died. Kate wants to leave her sheltered world and she’s not good enough to be a secretary. She starts the job the day both Don Wesley is killed and that not long after Jimmy Lawson is shot.

Maggie is suffering from immense trauma from her upbring and another darker fact that I won’t bring up here. She clings to finding out who the Shooter is to try and find Terry’s approval, something she knows in her heart she will never get. Kate because of her upbringing knows people at the hospital Jimmy is brought to and she finds out very quickly the holes that are in his story. Eventually Kate and Maggie begin to reluctantly work together in order to follow a lead that they think will lead back to the Shooter. It ends in utter disaster with three people dying and Maggie wounded. It’s telling that Terry’s reaction to his daughter nearly being killed is to demand that she quit and to call her a disgrace to the family.

The clearest point as to how these men think comes when Kate and Maggie are going through files on the shootings of the cops and think they’ve found a pattern. They are at the Lawson household and when Maggie takes it to them, we listen to them trade war stories with the bigotry, sexism and utter contempt for the liberal order that is typical of the 1970s. (To make their point the first line we hear Terry say in the discussion: “So what happens? Kennedy gets shot and the only thing standing between us and that commie brother of his is an Arab with a .22.) None of them are interested in evidence or patterns. All they care about is finding the vague description of who did it and then shooting first. They don’t have to bother with asking questions. In their world, no one will bother to do so.

Perhaps the most critical part of Cop Town is how it deals with the LGBTQ+ community. For all those who look at America today and say how horrible it is, Slaughter makes it very clear just how much worse it was. Without revealing too much halfway through the novel it is implied the Shooter committed his murders because he was gay and all of the cops that were killed were gay too. None of this is true but when several people learn about it they are more horrified by the fact that this suspect is gay than a multiple murderer. When Terry learns of it he determines that the suspect be killed and given a cop’s death in order to spare the department the shame.

At one point Maggie and Kate visit a gay club that no one in Atlanta knows exists. “You didn’t come here if you didn’t know what it was for, and if you didn’t know what it was for, you probably never noticed it…There wasn’t even a sign on the door.”

That there was a police cruiser parked outside the establishment seemed to have little effect on traffic…Cars surrounded Kate on all sides. Some even smiled at her as they walked towards the building….None of the men seemed worried that two female cops had walked in the door.

And it’s telling that Kate, who had almost no idea of what homosexuality was before she learned about it at the hospital has a reaction to it:

“Kate didn’t know what she was expecting. Lecherous glances, filthy rooms. For the most part the men looked like couples who’d met for a drink before lunch. Hands were being held…Glances were being stolen across the room. The atmosphere was loose and casual. Barring the fact that everyone was of the same sex, the place felt like every club Kate has ever visited.”

It’s telling that when two men give up their seats to Kate and Maggie, it’s the first time in the novel either of them have been treated with politeness by anyone.

Furthermore earlier we go into a rooming house where it is rumored a transexual (less flattering terms are used) has been pimping for a while. Kate and Maggie visit the place twice and its only on the second occasion that both of them realize that it’s the person running the boarding house. Furthermore Maggie and Gail have mistaken her as Portuguese when Kate realizes she’s Jewish. Kate has figured both of these things out well ahead of Maggie and probably Gail and the two are able to have a civilized conversation until the pimp reveals that he is as contemptible as all of the heterosexual ones and just as much a criminal.

All of this is critical because much of the novel involves leaving one’s comfort zone and seeing a side of the city that Kate has never been aware of and that her father has truly wanted to learn about. Kate’s family has suffered its share of anti-Semitism over the years — they almost casual mention a bomb threat to their synagogue — but they have a far more layered appreciation of humanity than Kate does. Kate’s Oma tells a very real story about the multitudes of people in a relationship with a bully from her school days who she met again during the war and who decided to show her kindness and mercy. “Evil people can do good. Good people can do evil,” she tells Kate. “There is no explanation.” For a world that is even more polarized now then when Slaughter wrote her book, this comes practically a bullet point.

Just as critical comes a speech Kate’s father gives not long after:

“For each of them., Atlanta is a different city. Yet they all take pride in ownership. They all feel that the city belongs to them, and that their idea of the city is what the city should be. And further they feel the need to protect it…. Your violent asshole, I assume he thinks Atlanta belongs to the violent assholes. Your horrible woman — maybe she thinks it belongs to the horrible woman. They both feel very strongly, I’m sure. But which Atlanta is the real Atlanta? Is it ours? Is it the one Patrick (Kate’s husband) knew? Does it belong to the blacks now? Did it ever belong to anybody?”

Kate’s father is encapsulating the conflict that has been going on for centuries and may never end about race, gender and social divide in America and the world. And he argues that Kate’s decision to become a policeman — to leave her sheltered world and venture into a world that terrifies her — makes her a far braver person than he will ever be.

This is an argument for sacrifice, public service and trying to see all sides of a story. And Cop Town makes it very clear how much certain people — particularly the white men in the Atlanta Police Department — will do anything in their power to hold on to what they have. We eventually learn that the Shooter is someone who basically believes in this vision and intends to carry it out.

Yet for all that the book ends with a note of hopefulness. In the final pages of the novel Maggie confronts Terry in a place he can no longer not listen to her:

“I don’t think you’re racist. Or sexist. Or anti-Jew. Or anti-gay. I think you’re scared…Your whole world’s upside down. You don’t belong any more….I think the whole world is gonna change. For me. For Kate. For the blacks….For you. Especially for you.”

The cynical would argue it hasn’t really but Slaughter’s contemporary writing and Will Trent as a series would argue otherwise. Policing has changed since 1974: it’s nowhere near perfect but it isn’t the hellscape that we see in Cop Town anymore. The kind of policing that Terry and his colleagues could cheerfully get away with as late as 1974 doesn’t exist at the same level it does today, certainly not in a city like Atlanta. Slaughter knows the change will come slowly and in different ways — there’s a scene near the end that shows how for one character in particular his life will have to be worse for a much longer period — but it did happen.

And maybe that’s why I think it’s important to read novels like Cop Town for people on both sides of the ideological spectrum. For those who are fundamentally conservative and want to restore the past Slaughter reminds us very clear that this is what the past they are hailing looks like and is not a pretty picture. For the progressive Slaughter shows signs of change — incremental ones to be sure, but the kind that need to happen for the reform they want to take place. And for those who just want to read it crackling good mystery novel Slaughter more than provides it every step of the way. There are places that may still call themselves cop towns but they’re not being run by the same kind of cops who were around in 1974 and if that isn’t progress I don’t know what you’d call it.