Courtesy of Harper Collins
New York Times bestselling author and Atlanta native Karin Slaughter remembers her grandmother’s abusive marriage to her grandfather.
“It was something we never talked about,” Slaughter says. “ … We wouldn’t acknowledge it, and we all knew it was happening. Our silence never protected her. It only protected my grandfather.”
The memory of this family “conspiracy of silence” (as she calls it) shaped the way Slaughter wrote the latest murder victim in her new thriller, The Secrets We Hide, which hit shelves August 11. The book is the second in Slaughter’s North Falls series (launched last year) and picks up six weeks after the first book, We Are All Guilty Here, ends (on a cliffhanger, of course).
The murder victim in The Secrets We Hide, Allison Vickery, is a police detective herself. But in the opening prologue, she is at home, packing things to flee her abusive marriage with her teenage daughter. She is murdered in her kitchen with her own gun by someone she loves, but Slaughter doesn’t reveal who.
“The community, once she’s murdered, everyone says, ‘Well, I knew she was being abused,’” Slaughter says. “But of course, at the time when she was alive and she could have used the help, no one would acknowledge it.”
The protagonist in the North Falls series, Emmy Clifton, abruptly becomes sheriff after her father, the longtime sheriff, dies in the first book. Emmy is one of the few people in Vickery’s orbit that tries to help her leave her abusive relationship. But each time, Vickery goes back.
“This is quite common in abusive situations,” Slaughter says. “It usually takes about five to six times of leaving to actually have the leaving stick.”
Vickery’s pattern of return makes her a nuanced victim, the kind Slaughter enjoys unpacking.
“I like to write complicated victims,” she says.
Emmy’s estranged sister Jude, an FBI agent who returns home to North Falls in the first book, helps Emmy investigate Vickery’s death. Emmy and Jude’s relationship is tense and fraught with secrets. The cliffhanger at the end of We Are All Guilty Here reveals exactly why.
Their friction, plus the grief they are experiencing after the deaths of their mother and father, give the book that satisfying dysfunctional family baggage that Slaughter writes so well. Underneath the twists and turns of a whodunit thriller, Slaughter builds the strong undercurrent of family drama. The two unfurl simultaneously.
The new book deals with themes that often recur in Slaughter’s novels: womanhood, motherhood, secrets, guilt, forgiveness, cyclical trauma and the echoes of violence.
The Secrets We Hide is Slaughter’s 26th book in 26 years. With every new book, Slaughter says she tries to challenge herself in a new way. This year’s challenge, she says, was to wrestle with the genre cliché “it’s always the husband.”
“Playing around with that was a really interesting thing for me to do,” she says. “Leaning into tropes that maybe aren’t necessarily always true.”
Courtesy of Harper Collins
As The Secrets We Hide has been hitting shelves around the globe this past week, Slaughter has been on national tour. It’s become an annual tradition of sorts to begin her tour near her hometown Atlanta. On August 8, she kicked off her tour at the Woodstock Arts Theatre with a sold-out crowd. She hit seven stops across seven states in the week that followed, ending at the Barnes & Noble in Buckhead on August 16.
