Tribalism in 1970s Atlanta: Karin Slaughter's "Cop Town"

Cop Town - Karin Slaughter

Atlanta, Georgia, 1975: it's a city undergoing change, but not in every department. The cop shop may be the worst, awash with good ol' boys who still think the darkies should stay in their place and that a woman is only good for one thing - and that thing certainly ain't police work. As Cop Town opens, the fifth policeman in recent weeks lies bleeding to death, shot by the hand known only as The Shooter. 

Into this steaming morass steps newly-minted patrol officer Kate Murphy, a gorgeous and marvelously stacked woman with two big secrets: one, she's a widow and two, she's not Irish. She was born Kaitlyn Herschel, Dutch and - gasp - Jewish.  Murphy's new partner is the brother of the man whose patrol partner bled out on page one, and the niece of the goodest and oldest of those good old boys that run the station house. As Murphy struggles to bear up under the avalanche of harassment, she learns that even her sisters in arms won't be much help. Yet it's the novice investigator who discovers The Shooter's pattern - and it's the rookie who just might be his next victim.

A standalone novel from the queen of series crime novels, Cop Town is veteran author Karin Slaughter's look back to the earliest days of women in the APD. It's pretty bleak - and the harassment and hatred aren't just directed at the first women in the department; they're directed at anyone who isn't a white male Protestant redneck. Heaven help the cop who's married to someone of a different race, and don't even think about them there nancy boys.

Karin Slaughter (from the author's website)

Readers are treated to the somewhat scary inner dialogue of "the Fox," as the killer knows himself, but never a clue as to his real identity. Slaughter does a good job of building the suspense while concealing the identity of the real villain behind a wall of likely suspects - none of which are suspected by the "real" cops.

Slaughter's alluded in the past to the hazing that faced APD's first female officers, especially in her Will Trent series: Faith's mother (Evelyn Mitchell) and her boss, Amanda Wagner, are both veterans of the department and some of the department's first female officers. She goes into much more detail here, from the ill-fitting uniforms to the crude language to the constant groping. In truth, it's all pretty disgusting; enough so that one has to wonder if the descriptions are hyperbolic.

Then again, it's clear evidence of a sort of tribalism; something Kate's psychologist father describes during a heart-to-heart with his daughter:

His smile indicated he knew he was being obtuse, but that Kate should bear with him. "Your violent asshole, I assume he thinks Atlanta belongs to the violent assholes. Your horrible woman -- maybe she thinks it belongs to the horrible women. They both feel strongly, I'm sure. But which Atlanta is the real Atlanta? Is it ours? Is it the one Patrick knew? Does it belong to the blacks now? Did it ever belong to anybody?"

Given the manner in which American society sometimes seems to be disintegrating into its own, similar sort of tribalism, Daddy Herschel's wisdom is particularly trenchant. Too many people seem to think that the country belongs only to people who share their narrow worldview and everyone else can leave. Feh.

Overall, an interesting take on both the environment facing the first women police officers and also on life on the redneck fringe. One would hope that those days are over, but then one need only look at the television news to see that such attitudes are alive and well. As for the mystery aspects of the novel, I give Cop Town a thumbs-up.