Guest Blogger: KARIN SLAUGHTER

Karin Slaughter is on a blog tour for her latest book, BROKEN, and I am delighted to host her today.


I’ve been writing about Dr. Sara Linton for ten years now, and I’m still surprised by the different aspects of her character. In Broken, it’s the week of Thanksgiving and she’s back home in Grant County for the first time in four years. Instead of being excited about being with her family, Sara is wary. A lot has happened since the tragic events that ended Beyond Reach. She’s had to build herself into a new person, and just driving into the Heartsdale city limits is so difficult that she has to pull over to the side of the road and collect herself.

It’s been almost a year since I wrote that scene, and I can still feel Sara’s anxiousness when I think about it. I suppose that’s the gift and the curse of being with these characters so long. I see them as human beings, and I feel their losses almost as if they were close friends. I also feel their anger, which is why writing about Lena Adams was hard this time around. She’s always been a difficult character because she’s very erratic and just when I think she’s on the right track, she takes a one-eighty and does the exact wrong thing.

Sara has been warning readers about Lena’s unpredictable behavior for years, and I think finally folks are seeing that she’s right. Yet, still, I find myself thinking—hoping—that Lena is going to manage to turn herself around. She’s not altogether awful. She tries to be a good cop. She loves her family. She’s been loyal to a fault. The thing is, people who do bad stuff never think they are bad people. That’s what I’ve always found so fascinating about Lena: she really thinks underneath it all that she’s doing the right thing. I think readers often take that ride with her.

In one chapter, you might think she’s finally managed to turn things around, and then in the next, she’s doing something breathtakingly risky and even downright stupid. I guess that’s why it was so much fun bringing Will Trent into Grant County, where he gets caught between these two strong women. On the face of it, Will seems like the character with the most flaws. He’s in a crappy relationship, he grew up in an orphanage, he’s got a mean boss and he’s dyslexic. And yet, of the three, he comes across as the least broken.

If you'd like to win a signed copy of BROKEN, along with several other thrillers, please visit www.bookbitch.com and click on the Win Thrillers page for all the details!




Karin Slaughter is the number one international bestseller of several novels, including the Grant County series. A long-time resident of Atlanta, she splits her time between the kitchen and the living room.