Is ‘Will Trent’ Ready for Sara Linton? Season 3 Teases a Major Character
The romance between Will and Angie is on-and-off, built on trauma.
Meanwhile, the Karin Slaughter novel featured a character who was the main character’s true love.
The showrunners are considering including her in the upcoming season.
Unfortunately, Will Trent Season 3 won’t be released until early next year. Until then, all we can do is binge-watch all the episodes on Hulu and read Karin Slaughter’s equally compelling novel. And if you’re familiar with the source material, you probably know that the writers made a few changes to the book’s plot, placing more emphasis on the complicated romantic relationship between Ramón Rodríguez’s Will and Erika Christensen’s Angie Polaski.
Meanwhile, in the novels, Trent’s main romantic interest isn’t Angie, but a character named Sara Linton. But will there be such a main character in Season 3? Will Trent’s co-producer weighs in.
Who is Sara Linton in the Will Trent novels?
While we hope Angie doesn’t lose her position at APD, we’re still hopeful that she and Will won’t be the ultimate targets. After all, the only thing holding them together is past trauma, and Karin Slaughter herself giving Trent a healthier love interest would make for an interesting dynamic.
Sara Linton first appeared in the Will Trent series in the 2009 novel Undone and has been a part of the story up until the most recent novel, After That Night. However, Sara was originally the main character of the Grant County series, first debuting in Blindsighted in 2001.
Sara is a pediatrician who works part-time as a coroner. She has raw intelligence and emotional intelligence, as well as a large burden of trauma, as much as any of Slaughter’s characters. However, Trent will have a much healthier relationship with her than he did with Angie, although it will take them both a while to realize that.
Obviously, Linton’s appearance in the series is not impossible and her presence has been on the radar. However, it is not yet known whether she will appear in Season 3 or later, as the writers are currently thinking about how to work her into the storyline. This has been confirmed by co-showrunners Liz Heldens and Daniel Thomsen. According to Heldens, now may not be the best time.
‘I think the door is open for someone new to come into his life. We have to talk about that, and we have to talk about that with ABC—like, there’s a logistical question here: Do we want to bring the endgame in now? Or is it interesting to find someone else [now]? We have to be careful about that. We have to be careful about something that affects the ecosystem of the show. We have to be thoughtful about that.’
For her part, Thomsen noted that they want to give Sara a much deeper arc than just treating her as Will’s new romantic interest.
‘There are two things to consider, one is that Sara Linton is a great character for television, right? So to have her come into our show at a time when Will needs a romantic interest, I feel like both [Liz and I] have spent some time thinking about this idea that maybe there’s a bigger role for Sara. But beyond that, we both know that she’s Will’s ultimate goal in the books. At this point in Will’s life, I don’t know if he’s ready for that, and there’s a lot of room to explore in other directions.’
Well, hopefully if Sarah Linton shows up as early as next season, her storyline will really deepen. Will Trent Season 3 is scheduled to release in January 2025.
