25th novel a major milestone for Atlanta crime writer Karin Slaughter

Credit: Courtesy of Karin Slaughter

Credit: Courtesy of Karin Slaughter

If Slaughter’s novel structures were more linear, the plotting might be easier. But for 25 years, Slaughter, 54, has remained committed to evolving as a writer. For her, that has meant playing with new forms, structures and time jumps. It has meant strategizing big reveals and planning plot twists.

With “We Are All Guilty Here,” Slaughter also knew in advance that it would be the first book in a new series. With her previous two series, Will Trent and Grant County, she wasn’t aware she was writing a series until midway through the first book. Planning a series intentionally means keeping in mind a much wider picture, building a rich-enough world and deep-enough characters to sustain multiple books.

“To stretch herself creatively with every book, to put her absolute heart and soul into trying to make it better than the previous (one), to not repeat herself, to make sure she’s not going back over old ground or becoming stale ― that is an extraordinary thing to achieve,” said Elton, who has edited 24 of Slaughter’s 25 books. “She’s done it with every book.”

Binge writer in the woods

In July, scraps of paper and cocktail napkins similar to those Slaughter and Elton scribbled on in Miami rested on the corner of Slaughter’s desk in her new second home in the North Georgia mountains.

“Please don’t photograph those,” she politely asked an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter. The scraps could likely reveal plot twists for the book she’s now beginning to write, the second book in the new North Falls series.

Slaughter typically begins writing her next book before the last one has even hit shelves. Her momentum is fast; her annual routine cyclic.

She typically goes on a book tour abroad from February through April; attends Slaughter Fest in London in June (a crime fiction fan convention named after her, now in its sixth year); goes on a U.S. tour; then plans and plots her new novel through the fall. September marks the beginning of a moratorium on events as she cracks down and launches full-force into writing mode to finish her newest book by Jan. 1.

Slaughter is a known binge writer. Rather than a daily writing regimen, she has always opted to leave her home in Decatur and drive north to the mountains where she writes in rigorous, double-digit-hour bursts for a few weeks at a time.

Until recently, those writing stretches took place in the lofted office of her cabin while kicked back in a recliner so beloved it’s molded to the shape of her body.

Credit: Marc Brester

Credit: Marc Brester

Her cabin was nicknamed Hemlock Holler for the trees that surrounded it and her fondness of alliteration. Her father built it for her, largely by hand, in 2000.

Inside, the space glowed golden from its lacquered wood floors, ceiling and walls. Rustic wooden beams accentuated the loft and a screened-in porch looked out into the forest. It was a quintessential retreat for a writer-in-the-woods. She loved it.

But a few years ago, the location of Hemlock Holler was leaked to the public. People started showing up. Slaughter decided it was time for a change.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Signs of success

Her new “cabin” is not so much a cabin as it is a contemporary rustic ranch-style home with rock-wall accents and a three-car garage in a gated neighborhood near Blue Ridge.

Her witty, warm personality is apparent in the decor the second one walks through the door. A triptych of her three cats, Mooch, The Bea and Dexie B., hangs by the guest bathroom. Antique photographs of her grandparents are on a shelf. Humorous sayings, such as “Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.” are printed on artwork and throw pillows.

Downstairs, on the garden level, is her temporary office. Contemporary couches encircle a chic fireplace. A desk looks out through massive picture windows framing lush trees and a flowering meadow. The new space satisfies her optometrist who warned her that her nearsightedness would get worse if she didn’t start looking up from her computer.

“This way I’ve got the mountains I can stare off into and hopefully reset my eyes,” she said.

About 20 paces out the glass side door, down an open-air walkway, is a high-ceilinged, blank white canvas of a room currently under construction. That room will eventually be Slaughter’s more permanent writing room and will help her compartmentalize her work.

Her current office has all the hallmarks of a writer. In one corner, sacred like a Bible on an altar, rests a thick Oxford dictionary with the etymology of words. The print is so fine it requires a glass magnifying dome to read it. Dictionaries for urban slang from different eras are spotted nearby.

Bookshelves dominate multiple walls. Their construction was a top priority.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

“When I moved here, I didn’t have bookshelves or anything like that,” Slaughter said. “They were all packed up and it made me really sad and upset not to be surrounded by books.”

Until the shelves were built, she stacked books around her chair to “create a sort of feeling of a bookshelf,” she said. “And when I was looking at new houses up here … if they didn’t have bookshelves, I just wondered about their souls.”

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Now the enormous wall of books behind her desk displays her college copy of “The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor.” A signed-edition of “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn is there, too.

Mostly, though, the shelves are packed with Slaughter’s own authored books in dozens of foreign languages with alternate covers often more provocative than the U.S. versions. Fish net stockings. Lush red lips.

Slaughter’s books have been published in 120 countries with more than 40 million copies sold.

Above the shelves are 25 black frames, each displaying the cover of one of her published novels.

The evolution of her writing space seems symbolic of her evolving success. Her career hit a few major milestones this year, including her 25th book (see sidebar), the launch of a third series and her first foray into showrunning.

From books to television

Of all the books Slaughter has written, one of her favorites is “The Good Daughter,” her stand-alone novel about two sisters, Charlotte and Samantha Quinn, who try to piece their lives back together after a night of violence shatters them 28 years earlier.

“I got to do a lot of things in (that book) that I wanted to do as a storyteller,” she said. “It was a challenge to write a thriller with believable characters who are not detectives … Finding a world in which they don’t have a legitimate reason to investigate and still making it a story that’s suspenseful and propulsive and relies on a lot of mystery of past and present was a really fun puzzle for me to figure out.”

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Ten years later, Slaughter challenged herself to solve another puzzle: How to turn “The Good Daughter” into a script for a series.

She had watched other writers adapt her “Will Trent” series for three seasons on ABC and Hulu, and witnessed others craft a script for a limited Netflix series of her stand-alone book “Pieces of Her” in 2022.

“I am in awe of their skill … Having read scripts, having been a little involved in the process, I wanted to have a deeper understanding of how things come together,” she said. “I had a month and a half between finishing my book and starting prepress for Europe … So I jumped in.”

While working out on her rowing machine, she started listening to “The Good Daughter” on audiobook. She began making notes and figuring out a structure. She downloaded Final Draft, a software for scriptwriting, and began to string words together. She kept her experiment a secret at first.

Her agent caught wind of her project and offered to option the book. Producer Bruna Papandrea from Made Up Stories wanted to option it. Slaughter said no. She was going to try to write it herself.

“I said, ‘I just want to see if I can land it. I’m not even sure if I can, but let’s hold off, and I promise I’ll show it to you if I think it’s any good,’” she said. “Having written so many books, I do know if something’s good or bad, but I felt like it was pretty good.”

Papandrea read Slaughter’s script. She agreed: It was good. Together they pitched the script to Peacock who signed on. Slaughter became the showrunner, which involves overseeing all aspects of production from casting to scouting locations, direction to producing. Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy were cast as the Quinn sisters.

When the production flew Slaughter to Toronto to scout locations, she grimaced.

“Toronto is a lovely city, but they don’t have kudzu everywhere,” Slaughter said. “They don’t have the drug and gun pharmacy. They don’t have the proliferation of churches and their town squares even looked different. It was really important to us to make it look Southern. And the only way to do that was to be in the South.”

Slaughter pushed for the production to stay in the Peach state. It filmed in many locations including Assembly Studios in Chamblee, Atlanta, Griffin, Marietta, and even Slaughter’s beloved Blue Ridge.

“On any given day, we had two to 300 Georgians who were employed,” she said proudly. “All these people were put to work.”

As a showrunner with massive responsibility and creative control, Slaughter was required to be on set for 71 days, bouncing around helping actors, watching over the shoulder of the director, rewriting scenes to accommodate for changing conditions like weather, even dictating what a framed fake newspaper clip hanging on the set’s wall should say.

“I wanted it to say, ‘Frankly I don’t give a cluck,’” Slaughter recounts laughing about the news story, which was about an attorney accused of snatching chickens.

Even between book signings in Europe, she watched the film shoots remotely from an iPad.

“I’m in the backseat of a car in the Netherlands and I’m watching,” she said.

As tempting as it may be for a writer to coach actors on the subtext, interiority and inner monologue they couldn’t include in scripted dialogue, Slaughter said Byrne and Fahy didn’t need it. The actors were intuitive and conveyed unsaid meaning masterfully.

“Rose Byrne is so amazing. She could do it with a look,” Slaughter said.

Watching characters in the flesh that had been born and existed only in her own mind for years was illuminating.

“In a self-serving way, it’s so flattering to give these lines to (actors) and watch them bring out a part of it that I didn’t even know was there” Slaughter said. “That’s the fun of the process because every step of the way, you’re dealing with incredibly talented people who have a way of interpreting your work, and they put their own mark on it.”

“The Good Daughter” wrapped filming in June. The premiere date is yet to be announced.

Will Slaughter continue writing scripts or showrunning?

“Well, maybe,” she said. “I’ve got a couple of projects but I love writing books still. And that’s my passion.”

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

‘Only halfway’

Boldly tackling new challenges such as scriptwriting and showrunning is characteristic of Slaughter, who has a history of pushing her own boundaries and crossing new things off her bucket list.

In June 2020, in a moment she now classifies as “a midlife crisis” and “losing her mind,” she went on ABC’s reality television “Holey Moley” where she was tasked with straddling a bucking mechanical gopher on a crane atop a 20-foot mountain to play mini golf. She later wrote about it in an essay published by the AJC.

When she wrote “This is Why we Lied,” the 12th book in her Will Trent series, she pushed herself to try on the skills of Agatha Christie by writing a locked room mystery, which she had never attempted before.

During the pandemic, when her book tour was canceled, she put herself out there on social media for her readers, showing them her zany sense of humor by donning silly hats, interviewing other authors and translating foreign fan mail.

For years she’s advocated for libraries through her nonprofit organization, Save the Libraries.

Most recently, when other writers might have stuck with the tried-and-true of not one but two successful series, she launched a third one instead.

“She’s just as creatively excited by challenges and writing as she’s ever been since I first met her,” said Elton. “She’s got so much creative energy.”

In the future, Slaughter may try a novel melding crime fiction with historical fiction or fantasy. A thriller can be more than one thing, she notes.

“‘The Great Gatsby’ is a murder mystery. ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is a courtroom drama … they transcend the (thriller) genre,” Slaughter said. “But it’s still the nuts and bolts of the genre I think that propels a good story.”

But first, she will work on the sequel to “We Are All Guilty Here,” which picks up just a month or two from where the first book ends.

“I’ve already got several pages under my belt,” she said. “I’m looking forward to getting into it after I get back from my U.S. tour.”

When asked where she thinks she’s at in her own character arc, Slaughter told a story.

When she was just a newbie in publishing, she got the opportunity to meet one of her literary heroes, Mary Higgins Clark, at a festival where they were both signing books.

“Clark had 20,000 people in her signing line and I had three,” Slaughter remembers. “I was slinking out the door and she stopped me and pulled money out of her wallet and bought one of my books. That meant so much to me. I said to her, ‘I hope one day that I get to write as many books as you. And she said, ‘Well, unfortunately, if you do that, you have to grow older.’ I am very mindful of that as I hit 25 books.

 “I hope I’m in the middle (of my arc) … 25 more books. We won’t do the math on how old I’ll be, but I mean, that’s one of the great things about writing … one can do it indefinitely if your body is willing and mind is able.”

Elton concurred.

“She is certainly only halfway,” she said. “Although she has clearly already done more than most people might in their entire plot arc, she is nowhere near the peak.”

AUTHOR EVENT

Karin Slaughter. FoxTale Book Shoppe presents Karin Slaughter in conversation with Mary Kay Andrews. 4 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 10. $42, including signed book. Woodstock Arts Theatre, 8534 N. Main St., Woodstock. 770-516-9989, foxtalebookshoppe.com

New thriller a family saga that spans generations

Slaughter’s 25th book, “We Are All Guilty Here,” centers on Emmy Clifton, a detective for the Clifton County Police Department (named after her own lineage).

Emmy works arm-in-arm with her father, Gerald Clifton, the town’s sheriff. Her son Cole is also a rookie police officer at the same station.

Credit: HarperCollins

Credit: HarperCollins

When her best friend’s teenage stepdaughter Madison goes missing alongside another teenage girl, it sends Emmy, Gerald and Cole on a twisty path to find answers. Ten years later, after another abduction occurs, doubt is cast on the Cliftons’ prior conclusion to the case. Did they convict the wrong guy?

Gerald’s estranged daughter Jude, a bigwig at the FBI, shows up to help analyze the cases. Dysfunctional family tension builds alongside the plot. Secrets about the case, and about the Cliftons, are dropped like breadcrumbs throughout the book, compelling continuous page turning.

Clifton County was partly inspired, Slaughter said, by the Murdaugh murders in coastal South Carolina, which occurred in a similar town with a family dynasty.

“We all have this idealized version of small towns and families that run them,” she said. “And what we don’t really understand is that kind of power centralized is a really bad thing … it can lead to crimes and murder and cover-ups.”

The Cliftons have a long legacy in their 20,000-person county.

“You have good Cliftons and bad Cliftons and rich Cliftons and poor Cliftons,” Slaughter said. “Some of them are in politics, some of them are in policing. Some of them are in the legal realm of prosecutors, judges, hospital administrators ― anywhere you would need someone with a little juice.”

The idea for the new series was seeded by a short story Slaughter wrote 20 years ago. (Readers who have read that story will already be clued in to a secret that drops with a bang in “We Are All Guilty Here.”). In that story, the protagonist is Jude in her 40s. The story centers on Jude’s trip home to confront wreckage from her young adulthood.

In “We Are All Guilty Here,” Jude is in her 60s and is not the protagonist, but still a central character. Emmy is in her 30s and the victims are 15.

“There was a deliberateness to choosing those ages,” Slaughter said. “Because at a certain point, each woman is almost double the age of the first. That was a very retrospective thing for me.”

Through the varying perspectives, Slaughter is able to explore a variety of silenced struggles particular to women. Toxic marriages. Caretaking for aging parents. Female friendship. Sexual exploitation and trauma. The book also grapples with themes of shame and victim blaming.

“[Society] puts a lot of judgment on these young girls. We have a lot of language around young boys and excusing behavior, whether it’s doing something stupid like blowing up a trash can or eating too much cake. We say ‘locker room talk,’ or ‘our boys will be boys,’” Slaughter said. “There are no equivalents for girls.”

Beyond being a crime thriller, “We Are All Guilty Here,” like so many of Slaughter’s books, is a family drama loaded with baggage and backstory.

“I grew up reading sagas. I love sagas, and I wanted this to be a family saga,” she said.

It’s also vital to create characters that are authentic in the face of horrific crimes in order to hold up an accurate mirror to our world, Slaughter said. “I’m very conscious these crimes happen to people every day. What I try to do is imbue the work with some humanity and put it in the context of society.”

Elton said Slaughter’s ability to create characters with such emotional depth sets her apart from flimsier crime thrillers.

“The relationships, the women, the psychological detail, the emotional weight … It’s interesting because I think that it’s easy for people to assume that thrillers are just about the pace and the narrative and the mystery,” Elton said. “But if you read through what people talk about, what I think makes Karin so special, is the emotional weight that makes readers feel.”