Karin Slaughter

Karin Slaughter is a crime thriller author that doesn’t really need any introduction for anyone who has picked one of her Will Trent books. She has also written the Grant County series, however, Will Trent was the character I have first read about from her books, and that series is still my favorite, especially since in 2019 Karin Slaughter worked together with my other favorite author, Lee Child, in bringing their two main characters together in the novella Cleaning the Gold.

Here are the Karin Slaughter books in order for her two main series, her standalone novels, and the numerous novellas she has written so far.

New Karin Slaughter Books

Cleaning the Gold (Jack Reacher & Will Trent novella), 2019

The Last Widow (Will Trent #9), 2019

Will Trent Series

1. Triptych (Will Trent #1), 2006
2. Fractured (Will Trent #2), 2008
3. Genesis (Will Trent #3), 2009 (aka Undone)
4. Broken (Will Trent #4), 2010
5. Fallen (Will Trent #5), 2011
6. Snatched (Will Trent #5.5), 2012
7. Criminal (Will Trent #6), 2012
8. Busted (Will Trent #6.5), 2013 (novella)
9. Unseen (Will Trent #7), 2013
10. The Kept Woman (Will Trent #8), 2016
11. The Last Widow (Will Trent #9), 2019

Grant County Series

1. Blindsighted, 2001
2. Kisscut, 2002
3. A Faint Cold Fear, 2003
4. Indelible, 2004 (could be read as a prequel for the beginning of Jeffrey and Sara’s relationship)
5. Faithless, 2005
6. Beyond Reach, 2007 (aka Skin Privilege)

Last Breath Series

• Last Breath, 2017 (novella)
• The Good Daughter, 2017

Standalone Karin Slaughter Books and Short Stories

• Like a Charm, 2004, edited anthology
• Martin Misunderstood, 2008 (novella)
• The Unremarkable Heart, 2011 (short story)
• The Blessing of Brokenness, 2012 (short story)
• Cold Cold Heart, 2013 (short story)
• Cop Town, 2014
• Pretty Girls, 2015
• Go Deep, 2015 (novella)
• Remmy Rothstein Toes the Line, 2015 (novella)
• Blonde Hair, Blue Eyes, 2015 (short story)
• Pieces of Her, 2018
• Short Story, 2018, (short story with Michael Koryta)
• Cleaning the Gold, 2019 (novella with Lee Child – a Jack Reacher & Will Trent story)

Who Is Will Trent?

Will Trent is the main protagonist of the Karin Slaughter’s second main series after Grant County. He is a GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation) special agent, dyslexic at that. He is good at hiding his dyslexia from other people, and because of that, he also has a better insight into criminals who are hiding something, because he already know the signs. He does read and write, just not very fast. He is working from the Atlanta office, a city with a high rate of crime, which keeps him always on his toes.

Will grew up in the Atlanta Children’s Home after being found in a trashcan as a baby and brought there. While at the orphanage, when Will Trent was 8, he met Angie Polaski, who also went to live at that place. They became friends and later one, partners in life, developing a serious relationship. Still the two were not really in love, so the relationship didn’t stand the test of time.

Will ended up working at the GBI in the Major Case Squad. He was always considered a very good agent (with a high rate of 80% of cases solved which was unusual in itself), but a loner, who preferred to work alone. Later on, he moved to the Special Criminal Apprehension Team led by Amanda Wagner, his new boss.

Because he is dyslexic, he is used to lots of tricks to hide what he considers a personal failure. For example, he can’t read maps or menus in new restaurants, so he only frequents known places where he has them memorized or knows the products by their labels.

As for the physical description, Will Trent is 6’3″ tall with broad shoulders; he is thin, tall, and strong, with short dirty-blonde hair and huge hands. He has several scars, one on his upper lip, one that runs down from his ear to his collar, and another one on the back of his head. Additional smaller scars on his body are from various torture elements like cigarette burns, whips, and electrical burns.

Karin Slaughter Biography

Karin Slaughter was born in 1971 in Convington, Georgia, hailing from a small, blue-collar community which is about fifty miles south of Atlanta where the author currently is living. She loved to read from a very young age when her father would read her stories that she would memorize. During weekends, she would go with her parents to the library, where she would spend hours browsing through and reading books. She grew up with Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown, .C. Andrews, and Daphne de Maurier, among others.

In an interview, she mentioned that it was her dad, ran a car dealership in Jonesboro,  who inspired her to become a writer, since he would read books to her from the time she was 6 months old.

She started writing stories from a young age, mostly dark stories about sisters getting murdered. Apparently this was her way of getting back to her two older sisters who often ignored her or were not very nice to her. She was always interesting in dark, gothic mysteries, not only because this is a tradition of the South, but also because many of the books her father read her were in that same genre.

She attended a Christian school, but she got kicked out of there for tearing up a copy of the Bible. It was during her college years when she decided that writing was something important to her, and it was time she took it seriously. She then dropped out of Georgia State University where she studied Renaissance poetry just two classes before graduation to work on her sign business which she sold at the age of 27 and started writing in earnest. She knew she always wanted to write books, so Karin Slaughter is living her life-long dream.

For her books, she spends a lot time thinking about them, putting them together in her head before writing her. Often a book takes her one full year to complete. During that year though, Karin can do research for 2-3 books at a time, so that cuts down on research for the next books, especially when those next books are part of the same series, like the Will Trent series. For research, she often talks to cops and federal investigators about various aspects of their jobs,

With her first standalone psychological thriller novel, Pretty Girls, Karin Slaughter wrote the book from the point of view of characters other than cops. It tells the story of two sisters whose third sister was murdered, and how they cope with the situation. The idea for Pretty Girls came to her during a dream. After hurting her back, the author was on some strong pain medication which gave her strange dreams. When she woke up from that particular dream, she realize that this would make for a great story.

Many of the Georgia native Karin Slaughter books deal with dark crimes, often sexually motivated. The author’s debut novel, Blindsighted, is about a serial rapist who crucifies the victims by driving nails in their hands, just like the did with a female detective that he kidnaps. That very first book has been translated into no less than 18 languages. Overall, Karin Slaughter sold more than 35 million books around the world, translated and published in 37 languages. She was also so far over 2000 weeks on bestseller lists around the world, which includes at least 15 New York Times bestsellers.

Besides being an author, Karin Slaughter is also a great advocate for saving libraries, so she is helping spread the word about the community needs for libraries around the country.

Praise for Karin Slaughter Books

If you’re into mystery thrillers, then you’re into Karin Slaughter. (TheSkimm)

Enter the world of Karin Slaughter. Just be forewarned, there’s no going back. (Lisa Gardner)

Breathtaking…. Fiction doesn’t get any better than this. (Jeffery Deaver)

All of Slaughter’s books… are satisfyingly surprising and plausible, but it’s Slaughter’s prodigious gifts of characterization that make her stand out among thriller writers…Slaughter’s satirical touches are as deft as her grimmer renditions of real life. (Washington Post)

Karin Slaughter is simply one of the best thriller writers working today. (Gillian Flynn)

Every Karin Slaughter novel is a cause for celebration. (Kathy Reichs)

A fearless writer. One of the boldest thriller writers working today. (Tess Gerritsen)

Karin Slaughter has – by far – the best name of all of us mystery novelists. More to the point, The Good Daughter is Karin Slaughter’s most ambitious, most emotional, and best novel. So far, anyway. (James Patterson)

References

• Karin Slaughter author website
• Author’s HarperCollins publisher page
• Save the Libraries

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