Slaughter sticks with Georgia as the setting for the Will Trent Series, but moves the action to the big city of Atlanta, where Will Trent and his partner, Faith Mitchell, explore life’s seamy side as special agents with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Slaughter has commented that Kisscut was the hardest book she’s ever written because of the darkness of the subject matter. They include Kisscut, A Faint Cold Fear, Indelible, Faithless, and Beyond Reach. Other books in the series continue to follow crimes investigated by Linton, Tolliver and Adams. Lena, emotionally involved, favors vigilante justice, and complicates Chief Tolliver’s handling of the case. Blindsighted also introduces Lena Adams, the town’s only female police officer–and the sister of the killer’s first victim. The horror grows as more women are murdered. The book’s action begins when a young professor is found dead and gruesomely mutilated. The book was a huge success, selling well and winning a place on the Crime Writer’s Association’s short list for the ‘Best Thriller Debut of 2001’. The series begins with Slaughter’s first book, Blindsighted, which involves the experiences of part-time coroner Sara Linton and her ex-husband, Heartsdale Chief of Police Jeffery Tolliver. Grant County Series:Īccording to Slaughter, Heartsdale, Georgia, the scene of her Grant County series, is a composite of all the southern towns she knew as a girl. She first read it as a young woman, and is still fascinated by the book’s insight into the inner workings of the Manson family. One of her favorite books–ever– is Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi. Some of her favorite non-crime fiction authors include Flannery O’Connor, John Steinbeck and Stephen King. She doesn’t read crime fiction when she’s writing, though, choosing to focus on other genres instead. Karin Slaughter confesses that she’s an avid fan of crime fiction and reads several books every week. In fact, one of her popular series of books, known as the Grant County Series, is set in a fictional Georgia town much like the one in which Slaughter grew up. She sets most of her books in the South, apparently adhering to the old saw that writers should ‘write what they know’. Slaughter is still a Southern girl: she lives in Atlanta and says that stereotypes about the South make her ‘absolutely furious’. The experience sparked an interest in how communities respond to crime. Slaughter says that her carefree childhood was interrupted by the changes brought about by the fear that spread through her community. She grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, during a time when Atlanta, located just up the road from Jonesboro, was reeling from a string of child murders. She was also influenced by the gruesome events occurring in the world around her. She was expelled from her Christian primary school for tearing a Bible apart, for instance and one of her first boyfriends was an undertaker-in-training. Slaughter was different in other obvious ways, too. Karin Slaughter didn’t mind being different, though even as a child, she was too busy reading to care what other people thought. This interest set her apart from most of the other little girls in her small hometown of Jonesboro, Georgia, where her father ran a local car dealership. Her last name really is Slaughter, and even as a small child, she was fascinated by the macabre.
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