Imagine that you are a paediatrician and the coroner in a small American town in ‘Grant County.’ You’re recently divorced from you police-chief husband (even though you secretly still love him); you take a routine lunch break at a diner with your sister, only to discover that in the toilet there is a woman bleeding to death. Later, you discover not only that she has been ritualistically murdered but also she was the twin sister of your ex-husband’s top detective, who has always shown a somewhat prickly animosity toward you … you are entering the first novel of crime-author Karin Slaughter, Blindsighted.

Slaughter has a knack for making the implausible seem rivetingly plausible. Her Grant County series, featuring paediatrician-coroner Dr Sara Linton, are riveting who-dunnits, fusing precise forensic science with a wildly inventive speculative imagination, which unerringly culminates in superbly chilling crime fiction.

Karin Slaughter’s burgeoning imagination has also created another compelling character, Will Trent, who made his first appearance in her novel Triptych published in 2006.  Despite his dyslexia and abusive childhood history, Trent has become the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s most intelligently intuitive crime-solving officer. Ashamed of his literacy problem, he is movingly blind to his genius as a detective. In her latest work, entitled Genesis and published in July 2009, Karin Slaughter brings the flawed  and wounded heroes, Will Trent and Sara Linton, together in a desperate and heart-stopping effort to solve a grisly murder.

Slaughter’s main characters are hurt, betrayed and even self-destructive human beings who even so display an inspiring commitment to truth and justice.