Best-selling crime novelist Karin Slaughter (yes, that’s her real name) grew up just south of Atlanta in the 1970s and ’80s, when the city saw some of its most gruesome crimes: A rash of child murders in which dozens of African-American children disappeared, their bodies turning up in nearby woods and rivers. The realization that horrid crimes can happen even to children changed Slaughter’s life.
“I went from this really fun, happy childhood where I could go anywhere I wanted on my bike as long as I was home by the time the sun went down, to always having to check in with my parents,” she says. “And that made me interested not just in crime, but what crime does to communities.”
Slaughter set her first books in a fictional Georgia county, but she soon realized she needed a real brewing city to make her gruesome crimes work, so she placed her Will Trent series in Atlanta. Trent is a fictional Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent who is smart, charming and hiding a secret — he’s dyslexic.
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