The crime writer Karin Slaughter has been plugging away at a new novel from her secluded cabin in Blue Ridge, Ga., and recently, the distant revving of a chain saw has disturbed her peace. “I have no idea where it’s coming from,” Slaughter says via Zoom from the cabin’s book-filled den. “I hope it’s a serial killer.”
She looks over her shoulder toward the noise. When she turns back, white hair piled high, she looks completely unfazed.
Perhaps it’s because Slaughter (yes, that’s her real last name; yes, she’s grown tired of jokes about it) has built a career imagining such worst-case scenarios. There are no chain saws in This Is Why We Lied (Morrow, Aug.), the 12th entry in her popular series featuring Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Will Trent, but the book’s bloodshed takes place in a setting just as sequestered as Slaughter’s cabin.
The novel opens with Will and his wife, medical examiner Sara Linton, preparing for their honeymoon at the luxe McAlpine Lodge in remote northwest Georgia. After Will and Sara hike to the facilities, making small talk with other couples, they sit down for a dinner hosted by the McAlpine family, who run the lodge. Soon, an explosive argument between 30-something Mercy; her teenage son, Jon; and her ice-cold parents halts the banquet. By the end of the night, Mercy has been stabbed and left for dead near one of the property’s cabins.
“I wanted to create this idea that it’s going to be one of these comfortable, Christie-like locked-room sort of things, and then spin it on its head,” Slaughter says of the novel’s And Then There Were None–style setup. “Because I doubt Agatha Christie would ever write about the things I write about.”
To call that an understatement would itself be an understatement. Addiction, abuse, and gory medical detail all factor heavily into This Is Why We Lied—well-trod territory for Slaughter. Across 23 years and as many novels, she’s developed a reputation for both quality and brutality, pulling few punches in her depictions of the often-gendered violence that animates her narratives. “I get a lot of tips from cops and prosecutors about cases I might want to look into and details I might want to incorporate into my writing,” Slaughter says. “But in general, by being a woman in the world, I’m familiar with the different types of aggression women and girls deal with on a daily basis.”
The main suspect in This Is Why We Lied is Mercy’s slimy ex-husband, Dave, whose beatings sent Mercy to the hospital during and after their volatile marriage. Though Mercy is dead by the end of the novel’s first quarter, her spirit haunts the action, with letters in which she catalogs Dave’s abuse punctuating several chapters. By the end, Mercy emerges as one of Slaughter’s most memorable creations: a wounded and complicated former fuckup who’s put herself on the straight and narrow, only to be pulled back into a whirlpool of violence that finally kills her.
Mercy was inspired, in part, by Slaughter’s grandmother, who was abused by her husband. “With my grandmother, we never talked about how she’d have a black eye or a broken bone. It was just a joke that she was clumsy,” Slaughter says. “She died in her 40s, and I realized that our silence never protected her. It only protected him. That’s one reason why I write in an unflinching way about these situations—there’s no fading to black. There’s nothing sexy or private that I want readers to stay out of when we’re talking about domestic violence.”
Slaughter has always preferred to approach the world with no-bullshit candor, but it hasn’t always been easy. As a teenager, she was sent to the principal’s office for pasting a photo of Marilyn Monroe’s freshly autopsied corpse to her lunchbox (“I thought I was being, like, this evocative feminist talking about the fleeting hope of beauty,” she admits with a smirk); in the early years of her career, she fielded constant questions about how she, as a woman, could write about so much violence. “I think men are profoundly uncomfortable reading about violence from a woman’s perspective,” Slaughter says. “The sense of jeopardy is heightened. And for a lot of them, they see the bad guy doing things they do in real life.”
Slaughter was born in 1971 in Jonesboro, Ga., a small city on the southern edge of Atlanta’s suburban sprawl. By the time she was 10, the region had been gripped by the saga of the Atlanta Child Murderer, who killed 28 people, mostly children and teenagers, from 1979 to 1981. That story, Slaughter says, as much as her childhood affinity for Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown, accounts for her tack toward crime fiction. “It made me very aware from a young age that crime exists and it can change people’s communities,” she says. “That’s what I like to write about in my novels—not the crime so much as what it leaves behind.”
To put it mildly, the approach has resonated. Since Slaughter debuted in 2001 with Blindsighted, which introduced Sara Linton and launched the six-part Grant County series, the author has become a fixture on bestseller lists, selling more than 40 million books, according to her publisher, and being translated into 37 languages. The Will Trent series has spawned a TV procedural on ABC, now in its second season, and Slaughter will spend the fall on set with a miniseries she wrote from her 2017 standalone novel, The Good Daughter, for Peacock. Pieces of Her (2018) got a Netflix adaptation starring Toni Collette.
Slaughter’s empire is vast, but she approaches its construction and maintenance with the pragmatism of a public-school teacher. “I don’t want to be precious about it,” she says. “I think it’s really important to hit my deadlines and do my part of the job.” Though she was a terrible student, frequently blowing through due dates and bringing home low marks in English (all while making her teacher cry with her literary snobbishness), the machine of Slaughter’s success has grown her into a more dependable writer. “I want to make sure I’m not delayed, so then my translator in the Netherlands doesn’t have to postpone work and rearrange her schedule. I want to make sure I’m being professional.”
It doesn’t hurt that, given the choice, Slaughter would dedicate most of her free time to writing. She loves to eat meals with her family, she says, and is liable to spend long afternoons on her rowing machine or at the golf course (“Only nine holes, I’m not a European”), but her perfect day always ends at the keyboard. “It is a job, so I won’t say I don’t think of it as a job,” she says. “But I feel more like myself when I’m writing than when I’m doing most other things.”
Not even a chain saw could slice through that.
