We Are All Guilty Here
This is a story about teenage girls who go missing, and the police efforts to find them. It’s also a story about a town, a community, about friendships and families. It’s a character-driven novel with a strong plot. A warning though: it does include some violent and disturbing scenes. (See my notes at the bottom about the author for why she addresses such themes in her novels.)
There are two parts to the story, both taking place in the small town of North Falls, Georgia. The story begins on a July Fourth evening, with two girls agreeing to meet at the community fireworks. By the next morning it’s apparent that they have both vanished, and Officer Emmy Clifton is part of the team charged with finding them.
One of the missing girls is her best friend’s daughter. The evening before, the girl tried to tell Emmy something but Emmy blew her off. Now Emmy feels guilty: If only she had paid attention, maybe the girl would still be okay.
Emmy’s father is the highly respected local sheriff, intent on passing on his knowledge and skills. Emmy’s the youngest of four children, two of whom died tragically before she was born. She’s been a police officer for six years and has good investigative instincts; she loves being a cop, though it takes juggling to manage with a young son and a deadbeat husband.
I won’t tell you much more about this section of the story, other than to say the two girls turn up dead and a local man is convicted of their murders. Revealing this is not really a spoiler — it’s apparent from the beginning that things will not turn out well for the girls — and it’s only a third of the way through the book. There is a lot still to come.
The second part of the book takes place twelve years later. After a podcaster has undermined the case against Adam, the man convicted of the girls’ death, he has been released on parole. Emmy and her father are revisiting the case, determined to put Adam back in jail. And now another teenager has gone missing. As the story unfolds it becomes more complicated, with numerous twists and turns, some of them startling enough to turn the story sideways. The characters are believable and relatable., and the plot is absorbing.
Slaughter is a talented writer who manages to keep the tension building and keep us reading, even when the details get disturbing. This book kept me turning the pages late at night. If it’s the beginning of a new series, I’ll definitely read the next one.
Karin Slaughter was born in a small town near Atlanta in 1971. She attended Georgia State University, but left before graduating to launch a sign-making company. In her spare time she wrote, producing several novel manuscripts, but didn’t succeed in selling one until 2001 when Blindsighted was published. That one, the first in her Grant County series with medical examiner Sara Linton and police chief Jeffrey Tolliver, launched Slaughter’s career as a writer.
Her second series, featuring Will Trent, a special agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, has has been picked up on TV and has become a popular police drama, now in its fourth season on ABC.
Slaughter’s novels often include graphic violence, particularly violence against women. In a 2021 video on YouTube, she says that what interests her is not just the violence, but how people deal with the aftermath, the trauma. She’s careful not to make the violence titillating or exploitative, but she wants to show the crimes realistically so they can’t be dismissed as “not that bad.” Her determination comes from memories of seeing her grandmother with black eyes or broken bones, while her abusive grandfather was never brought to task. “The silence never helped her,” she says.
A native of Georgia, Karin Slaughter lives in Atlanta.