What do you write for your next book when you have a best-selling thriller series like Will Trent (which is also a hugely-popular TV show?) If you’re the one-and-only Karin Slaughter, you flip the script and move all the action to a remote mountain cabin where a dream honeymoon turns into a murderous nightmare.
That’s the premise for This Is Why We Lied, a tense and twisty tale in which Georgia Bureau of Investigations special agent Will Trent and his new bride, medical examiner Sara Linton, are on their honeymoon at a mountain lodge. A raging storm has closed down the only road leading to the mountain, cutting them off from the rest of the world, and the owner of their honeymoon lodge is killed. They must solve the mystery before more people die.
“Every book I write I want to do something new or interesting or different,” Slaughter explained. “I realized I’d never done a locked room mystery before.”
She also says she decided this sort of scary, isolated setting was the best way to handle the marriage between Will and Sara, both long-running characters in her books.
“I’m not the kind of writer who would do romantic wedding scenes. So I thought this would be the next best thing. The hardest thing to write if you’re a thriller writer is people who are happy. It was a good challenge to have the tension not come from ‘will they or won’t they break up.’
“We know they have a very strong relationship, but they are not always going to see things the same way. How will that work with them being married now and how will that change their relationship? I wanted to explore it. And also have a very horrible murder because that’s the kind of book I write.”
“I couldn’t start the book with Will and Sara being super happy on their honeymoon,” Slaughter said. “I’m always looking for points of tension. I wanted to be really clear that something bad is going to happen.”
There’s also a compelling plot line from Will’s own troubled background. A bully from a group home unexpectedly turns up as one of the people working at the mountain resort – and becomes a prime murder suspect.
“I take a different approach with each book as to which character gets the focus. Previous books have centered on Sara, sometimes Faith or Amanda (two of the people Will works with as a GBI investigator.) I thought this would be a really good Will book, to be at the high point of happiness and then to have this drag him back with this horrible person from his childhood, to give him perspective and make him think: ‘I could have wound up like that.’”
This is the 12th book in the series. Even though her next book is a standalone, there will be another Will Trent thriller after that, and Slaughter plans to keep on writing them for as long as she feels the series still works. She laughs when asked just how long Will might be around. “I still feel strongly like there’s more. I feel equally as strongly that when there’s not…. I’ll stop.”
