Now that that’s out of the way, I want to thank you for reading my books, whether you are a new reader or whether you’ve been reading from the beginning. If you are in the latter category and you are wondering how many years have passed since Blindsighted, the number you are looking for is nineteen.
I know what you are thinking—“I read Blindsighted when my first child was born and now she’s pregnant with her first!”
Reader, these are heart-warming stories that I do not want to hear.
When I started thinking about the idea for The Silent Wife, I knew I wanted to go back to Grant County, but I also knew after nineteen years (and sixteen books) of putting Sara in the most heinous situations imaginable, I could not bring myself to make her forty years old. In fact, in the current Will Trent books, only five years has elapsed between Jeffrey’s death and the current stories, which worked out fine in the Will Trent world, but presented an issue when I was structuring the latest story, mainly because of the massive technology gap between the two series. In 2001, Yahoo! and BlackBerrys were cutting edge. Facebook, Google and iPhones were either not yet invented or in the nascent stages. I remember using an America Online CD as a coaster beside my tube computer monitor while I wrote the book. For the love of God, my laptop weighed almost as much as my cat.
Given these challenges, I decided to take advantage of the fact that my books are fiction. Instead of nineteen years elapsing between Blindsighted and The Silent Wife, the number is eight. (Weirdly, that is exactly how much I have aged in the physical world.) In Grant County, Sara now drives a Z4 instead of a Z3. Lena has a BlackBerry. Marla Simms still uses an IBM Selectric, but that was considered dinosaurish even in 2001. If you are wondering where Gina Vogel’s vexation comes from, now you know.
I hope you will forgive my quantum leap. I so enjoyed being with Jeffrey again, especially at a point in his relationship with Sara that I’ve never written about before. But I was also reminded of how much I love Will, and how when I chose to end Jeffrey’s story, I told myself that the best way to honor him was to make Will earn it. If you’ve been paying attention, Will has certainly earned it. For me, the line that summed up the two great loves of Sara’s life comes early on in The Silent Wife, when she thinks, “With Jeffrey, Sara had known that there were dozens, possibly hundreds of other women who could love him just as intensely as she did. With Will, Sara was keenly aware that she was the only woman on earth who could love him the way that he deserved to be loved.”
I bet you guys didn’t notice that I’ve been secretly writing love stories.
Really gritty, violent love stories, but still.
At the very beginning of my career those nineteen long years ago (or eight, in Karin Years) I made the decision that what I was writing about would matter from one book to the next. That’s why I decided to let go of Jeffrey. That’s why I decided to write frankly about violence against women. I felt it was important to openly describe what that violence actually looks like, and to explore the long-lasting effects of trauma in as realistic a way as possible. If I’ve done anything with these two series, I hope that people will look at them as an honest telling of stories we do not often hear about survivors, fighters, mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, friends and rogues.
And to answer the question that I hope you are asking, there are going to be more Sara and Will stories. I look forward to the journey ahead.
Karin Slaughter
Atlanta, Georgia
Enjoyed
The Silent Wife
? Make sure you’ve read Karin Slaughter’s previous books:
Three …
A woman is abducted in front of her child.
Two …
A month later, a second is taken in explosive circumstances.
One …
But the web is bigger and darker than anyone could imagine.
The clock is ticking to uncover the truth.
Click here to order a copy of The Last Widow.
A terrifying act of violence …
It takes a split second for your life to change forever. And for Andrea Oliver that split second is a mass shooting in her local mall.
A woman whose life is built on a lie …
But this shocking act is only the start. Because then, as the bodies fall around them, Andy’s mother Laura takes a step forward into the line of fire.
A fight for survival …
Hours later, Laura is in hospital, her face splashed over the newspapers. But the danger has only just begun. Now Andy must embark on a desperate race against time to uncover the secrets of her mother’s past before any more blood is shed …
Click here to order a copy of Pieces of Her.
One ran. One stayed. But who is … the good daughter?
Twenty-eight years ago, Charlotte and Samantha Quinn’s childhoods were destroyed by a terrifying attack on their family home. It left their mother dead. It left their father – a notorious defence attorney – devastated. And it left the family consumed by secrets from that shocking night.
Twenty-eight years later, Charlie has followed in her father’s footsteps to become a lawyer. But when violence comes to their home town again, the case triggers memories she’s desperately tried to suppress. Because the shocking truth about the crime which destroyed her family won’t stay buried for ever …
Click here to order a copy of The Good Daughter.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First thanks always go to Kate Elton and Victoria Sanders, who’ve been with me from the beginning. Next I’d like to thank my HarperCollins GPP peeps
