Karin Slaughter on the REAL LIFE murders that helped inspire new book | Celebrity News | Showbiz & TV

Donald Trump might disagree, but America doesn’t have kings. At least not since 1783 when the young colony won independence from Britain. But while the idiosyncratic US President has likened himself to a monarch, the real and constant power, according to veteran crime writer Karin Slaughter, lies in America’s dynasties.

It’s a theme the creator of the hit Disney+ Will Trent series explores in her stellar new thriller, We Are All Guilty Here, which introduces a brand new cast of characters and a deliciously twisty, psychologically tinged plot set over several decades. Good and bad, rich and poor, the extended Clifton Family has dominated business, governance and law enforcement in south-western Georgia for generations.

Unsurprisingly, they have a few skeletons in their closet. Think Barbara Taylor Bradford… with murder! “She was amazing,” Slaughter smiles at the comparison. “I grew up reading sagas, and I wanted to write something like that about this family.”

The Georgia-born writer, in London last week for the launch of her novel, was influenced by the case of a South Carolina family, the Murdaughs, who, she says, “basically ran” part of the state – dubbed “Murdaugh Country”. “They were involved in the prosecutor’s office and policing,” she continues.

“They were revered locally but, as you know, power corrupts, and eventually there were murders – an entire family was killed – and the fallout was incredible. So I wanted to talk about dynasties and why sometimes that gives one family too much power.”

Deliciously so, in the case of her new book, set against the backdrop of North Falls in, you guessed it, Clifton County, population 20,000. “I like the idea of good Cliftons, bad Cliftons, the poor Cliftons and the rich Cliftons… how they overlap and how complicated family relationships are,” Slaughter continues.

Now 25 years into her career and having sold more than 40 million copies, while being a constant presence in the bestseller charts, she describes the new book as a “creative reset”. “I thought it was a good time to return to my roots,” she says.

“Creating a group of interconnected characters in a small-town community. I liked the idea of ‘world building’ a new place to give me ample opportunity to kill people and commit crimes!”

Slaughter, 54, is one of the world’s foremost writers about misogyny and violence against women and, as ever, strong female characters provide the emotional core of the book. Police officer Emmy Clifton, a late arrival for her parents, is daughter of veteran sheriff and family patriarch, Gerald Clifton, 74.

When two teenage girls, Cheyenne Baker and Madison Dalrymple, are abducted and murdered, her lifelong friendship with the latter’s stepmother Hannah turns toxic after it emerges Emmy brushed off the anxious teen shortly before her disappearance.

Readers in the UK may be reminded of the horrific Soham murders of ten-year-old friends Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, by school caretaker Ian Huntley. Slaughter knows the case – her books inevitably necessitate a “s***-ton of research” – and tells me that, in real-life, such double abduction-murders are thankfully rare.

“I read research papers and I read academic scholars and I’m very mindful of those, because I feel a great responsibility writing about violence against women,” she continues. “When I first started writing a million years ago, violence against women was told from a very male perspective and the solution was always a man would save a woman.

“Well you might be physically saved, but not psychologically. So I wanted to write about the lonely places victims, predominantly women, find themselves in.” Early on in her career, she felt nearly every book critic seemed to be a man. “And it just scared the s*** out of them to read about violence from a woman’s perspective because they’d never done that before.

“It was hard for some of them to understand why a woman would write about that.”

During a wide-ranging conversation, about everything from migration to misogyny, Slaughter frequently sets me straight.

And despite being a writer of page-turning fiction, whose books are never less than utterly entertaining, she should be required reading for anyone wanting to better understand toxic masculinity and the struggles faced the world over by women. Last time we spoke, the US Supreme Court had just controversially overturned the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that legalised abortion nationwide in America. Slaughter was fuming. Today she remains horrified at the steady erosion of civil liberties.

“There are certain tenets I grew up with as an American that have gone to the wind and that really bothers me. It’s the hypocrisy and the belief that, ‘We can’t get our way democratically, so we’re going to exert control.’ Wisconsin voted to allow abortion and reproductive rights in a referendum, and the Republican lawmakers just reversed that.”

Being young and especially female, she fears, is becoming harder. She mines the experiences of nieces and nephews for her portrayals of young people. “And I have friends with kids and I just steal from them,” she smiles. “But I also remember what it was like. It was hard when I was a teenager but now…how do they do it? How do they survive? And how do they navigate into adulthood, particularly when we have a society that rewards selfish behaviour?”

This is reflected in We Are All Guilty Here in attitudes towards Madison and Cheyenne that we might call victim blaming. After jailing the man they believe to be the killer, a local bad seed known as “the Perv”, the action leaps forward 12 years.

Despite failing health, Gerald remains sheriff while Emmy continues to deal with the fall-out from the murders and the guilt that dogs her every step.

“The book deals a lot with memory, which is just where I am in my life, where you’re looking back. You see fewer years ahead than behind,” Slaughter says. “Despite being a millennial, Emmy’s one of the most Gen-X characters I’ve written because she’s dealing with raising a child and her ageing parents.”

She continues: “I wanted to have Gerald at a point in his life where he is reflecting on the bad decisions he made and making a choice to be a better person. We forget we can choose not to be grumpy assholes, or we can say, ‘Maybe the problem, to paraphrase Taylor Swift, is me’. Gerald made a choice and part of that came through raising Emmy.”

Slaughter remains incredibly close to her own father, Howard. “He had some health problems,” she says. “He’s okay now, but we really thought we were gonna lose him and so that played a lot into Gerald.”

When a podcast throws doubt on the Perv’s conviction, it leads to his release and opens a whole new can of worms. Then another young girl goes missing, in chillingly similar circumstances, and Emmy finds herself in the eye of the storm.

It’s classic Slaughter territory, into which she throws in newly retired FBI agent Jude – and it soon emerges she has a link to the Cliftons. It’s a world away from the Disney+ adaptation of Slaughter’s best-selling Will Trent series, featuring the dyslexic and, quite possibly, on-the-spectrum Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent.

Starring Puerto Rican actor Ramón Rodriguez as Will, and Erika Christensen as his childhood girlfriend turned homicide detective Angie, the hit series, which was renewed earlier this year for a fourth season, has alarmed some purists for taking a lighter touch than the bestselling books on which it is based. Slaughter remains sanguine. “I am involved in it and I love what they’re doing,” she smiles. “But I knew it was Disney so they’re not gonna have Angie be a heroin addict who kills her childhood pimp, right? I’m proud of it.”

Separately, her standalone novel, Pieces Of Her, was adapted for Netflix starring Aussie actors Toni Collette and Bella Heathcote, and Slaughter has adapted her 2017 novel, The Good Daughter, for TV.

But we can expect more from the Cliftons and Emmy in the future. While her work inevitably revolves around violence towards women, Karin insists she is an equal opportunities writer: “I kill men in my books, I never get credit for that! »

She adds: “There are a lot of boys as well and girls who do crazy s*** when they’re teenagers. And you don’t really find out about it until they’re 40 and they’re drinking a glass of wine and talking about, ‘How did we survive?’

“They were just at a point in their lives where they were acting out and trying to become women and they were targeted by a predator. And that happens more than we like to admit – a lot of women have this sort of thing in their past and never speak about it.” But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t read about it.

• We Are All Guilty Here by Karin Slaughter (HarperCollins, £22) is out now in hardback, ebook and audio