Karin Slaughter launches new book while overseeing Peacock TV series

As Karin Slaughter talks about her new thriller book series, “We Are All Guilty Here,” she’s equally wry, reflective and ready take off on a whole new level.

Her success is formidable: 24 novels have sold more than 40 million copies and been translated into 120 languages. They include the Grant County series featuring Sara Linton, a small-town pediatrician and medical examiner, which was followed by another centering on the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Will Trent. The Will Trent series is the basis for the hit ABC TV series starring Ramón Rodriguez that was recently renewed for Season 4. Add to that a half dozen standalones, including “Pieces of Her,” adapted into a 2022 Netflix series starring Toni Collette, and an upcoming Peacock adaptation of “The Good Daughter,” and Slaughter’s rise to the present moment makes sense.

Two things are striking when talking to Slaughter over Zoom from her second home near the small town of Blue Ridge, Ga.: One, the massive deep-purple bookshelves that cover the entire back wall of her office and almost dwarf the petite writer do not resemble the brag walls I’ve seen in some writers’ offices. Slaughter’s bookcase — which she reveals she designed herself — includes work by Southern writers she admires and champions. (More on that later.) Two, she seems very much at ease as she prepares to launch the new book in the midst of a grueling schedule to bring “The Good Daughter” to the small screen as a limited series next year.

Pretty impressive for a writer who mentions that, early on, she sold only three books at a book conference where she appeared alongside the late mystery legend Mary Higgins Clark, who sold “about 12,000 books.” Slaughter laughs at her exaggeration, but it’s clear that it was a humbling experience. “I was sneaking out the back with my tail between my legs,” she remembers, “and Mary caught up to me, took some cash out of her wallet and said, ‘I want to buy one of your books.’” It was an act of generosity that Slaughter has paid forward many times over as she’s bought the books of lesser-known writers and championed their work, both in the U.S. and the U.K. But Southern writers are where Slaughter’s heart is, her face lighting up as she talks about her favorites.

“My life changed when I read Flannery O’Connor,” she explains. “I was a very strange little girl who didn’t quite fit in and who wrote these really jarring, sometimes violent stories. The early ones were about my sisters being murdered or kidnapped or just disappearing. And the happy ending was always that I became an only child!” Joking aside, she adds, “People were telling me I was weird, that what I was doing wasn’t very ‘ladylike.’” But when a local librarian put a book of Flannery O’Connor short stories in her hands, something shifted.

“I was like, ‘Wait a minute!” she says. “O’Connor was very weird; she lived in a small Southern town like me. She never fit in. And she was famous for writing these short stories. She created a whole freaking genre!”

Later, reading Alice Walker, young Slaughter gained a deeper understanding of a world where slavery wasn’t as romantic as “Gone With the Wind” had led her to believe. “Walker’s writing was so eye-opening for me. That world was never presented to me, a little middle-class white child living in the South.”

The Atlanta child murders from 1979-81 had an equally profound impact on the fledgling writer, a voracious reader of novels across all genres. “It made me very aware of crime,” she says. “And not just the crime itself, but how it changes communities and people, even in my idyllic small town.”

How small was her hometown of Jonesboro in those days? “When I was growing up, there was a guy on the corner of our street who had been convicted of being a pedophile. Story was, he wasn’t sent to prison because he was a family man, and the prosecutors didn’t want to ruin his life.” Her fingers make air quotes to emphasize the irony of the perpetrator being favored over his victims, an injustice she’d rectify decades later in her fiction.

But the Atlanta child murders gripped the city and outlying suburbs like Jonesboro and changed her community’s worldview. “Before, we looked at bad people as ‘different,’ as a shaggy-haired stranger when we should have been looking at the guy on the corner,” Slaughter says.

She explores that truth in “We Are All Guilty Here.” Teenaged Madison Dalrymple, itching to escape with bestie Cheyenne Baker to the glamorous life in 2011 Atlanta, hates everything about her small hometown North Falls, including 70-year old Sheriff Gerald Clifton, whose “great-great — however many greats — grandfather” was a founding father of the county. The Cliftons, especially Gerald, are treated like royalty by residents: “Madison’s dad joked that everybody who wasn’t a Clifton either worked for the Cliftons or had been arrested by the Cliftons.”

Gerald’s daughter, Emmy, 30, is a sheriff’s deputy working the town’s Fourth of July fireworks show while trying to shake off an argument with her ne’er-do-well husband. In the process, she brushes off Madison, who seems desperate to talk. Hours later, Madison is missing, and a guilt-ridden Emmy, led by her father, joins other deputies racing against the clock to unravel the whereabouts of Madison and Cheyenne — with tragic results.

Like many of Slaughter’s novels, “We Are All Guilty Here” is not for the squeamish — she is steadfast in her mission to realistically depict violence against women as a way of warning them about the dangers that can lurk in even the most trusting of relationships. And it wouldn’t be a Karin Slaughter thriller without a few twists, not the least of which is a time jump from the disappearance of the girls until a second disappearance in North Falls 12 years later upends assumptions about the perpetrator of the first crimes and kicks off a new investigation involving an older and wiser Emmy and her son Cole, also a deputy sheriff, as well as Jude Archer, a mysterious, recently retired FBI profiler come to town to consult on the new investigation. It’s a structure that shows off the veteran crime writer’s meticulous plotting of a lot more than the crimes at hand.

“I planned all of it from the beginning,” she admits, relishing a discussion of some of the subtleties of the Clifton family dynamics that add depth to the novel. “And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t completely unaware of the Murdaugh family when I created them.”

The attention Slaughter gives to building out the world of North Falls and Clifton County in the novel also allows her to touch on issues of racism, xenophobia and homosexuality, territory also mined by other contemporary Southern writers she admires, including S.A. Cosby, Wanda Morris, Denene Millner and Connie Briscoe. “I’m writing my Southern experience, but I also live in Atlanta, a very diverse, multicultural and vibrant city,” Slaughter says. “I live in a state that has blood on its hands from the scourge of slavery. I live in a country that is still dealing with that. And I think that when you’re writing a complicated, psychologically driven story, you have to acknowledge those things. But I don’t think you have to jump up on a soapbox because readers will do their own work.”

Slaughter took on a new kind of challenge when she adapted “The Good Daughter” for NBC’s streaming platform. “It started just as a thought experiment to see if I could do it,” she says of the decision to write the “Good Daughter” script before the book was optioned for TV. “I didn’t want to waste anybody’s time.” But then Bruna Papandrea of Made Up Stories and Fifth Season came on as producing partners, and Peacock picked up the project straight-to-series.

For much of the production, Slaughter was the limited series’ lone writer and showrunner. Previously she served as an executive producer on “Pieces of Her” and “Will Trent,” but not in a hands-on way. “On the other projects, I read the scripts and gave feedback with varying degrees of acceptance and collaboration,” she says. But for “The Good Daughter,” Slaughter did almost everything, from script writing to making decisions on costumes and signing off on budgets.

“Will Trent,” an ABC adaptation of Slaughter’s first book series, was renewed for its fourth season in April.

(Zac Popik / Disney)

While it sounds daunting for a first-timer, Slaughter took it in stride. “People forget that, as an author, you’re really running a small business,” she explains. “You’ve got to deal with contracts and business relationships with different publishers all over the world, so I felt like those skills translated. And there’s a lot of hurry up and wait on book tours with the media and press junkets and book signings, so the production schedule for ‘The Good Daughter’ was like being on a book tour for 71 days as opposed to two weeks!”

“The Good Daughter” is the story of Charlotte and Samantha Quinn, daughters of controversial attorney Rusty Quinn, who survive a brutal invasion of their home in rural Pikesville, Ga., that’s linked to one of their father’s cases. The shocking crime, outlined in the book’s opening chapter, is both violent and heart-wrenching, and it shatters the Quinn family and separates the sisters. Years later, they reunite when Charlie (as Charlotte is nicknamed), now a criminal attorney herself, witnesses another murder, this time a school shooting. When their father decides to defend the accused teen, it dredges up past traumas for Charlie and Sam as well as secrets Pikesville residents and the Quinn family have hidden for years.

Slaughter found “The Good Daughter” production exhilarating, working with many of the “Will Trent” crew members as they filmed on location in and around McCaysville and Blue Ridge, where the story is set. She credits the crew, a collaborative relationship with director Steph Green and great performances — by Rose Byrne as Samantha Quinn, Meghann Fahy as Charlotte Quinn and Brendan Gleeson as their father Rusty — with making her first time as a showrunner memorable. “Everybody really believed in this story. And I’m really proud that we were able to tell it through a woman’s lens; everything that happens in the series is only told from Sam or Charlie’s point of view. But it’s also the first show I’ve ever seen that has a survivor of gun violence as a main character.”

While Slaughter is mum on whether she’d undertake another showrunner role, she’s excited about what’s next, which definitely includes a second North Falls thriller. What’s it about? “Let’s just say somebody dies and we find out why at the end,” she quips before adding more seriously, “I know that doing all that-world building and work on my North Falls characters won’t pay off until maybe next book or three books from now. It took a lot of discipline to not reveal so much, but over 24 books, I’ve learned to be patient and trust that readers will want to stay with me for the ride.”