'Will Trent' creator Karin Slaughter is coming to LI

Crime certainly does pay for Karin Slaughter. Since the release of her first novel, "Blindsighted," in 2001, the Georgia native has been a mainstay on The New York Times Bestsellers list, with more than 20 works to date.

Her latest, "This Is Why We Lied," is the 12th entry in her popular "Will Trent" book series. In this edition, Trent and his bride, Sara Linton, are honeymooning at a mountain lodge in rural Georgia when they stumble upon a grisly murder.

Slaughter, who is coming to The Next Chapter in Huntington on Aug. 19 for a talk and book signing, recently spoke to Newsday about "This Is Why We Lied" as well as her involvement in ABC's TV series "Will Trent."

How hard is it to keep these characters fresh after all those books?

One way that I do it is to write each book to stand on its own. So if you’ve never read about Will Trent or Sara Linton in your life, you can just pick up this book and I’ll give you the information you need to enjoy this book. You don’t have to do any homework.

Having them on their honeymoon has certainly taken Will and Sara's relationship to another level.

And they are also in a very different sort of location. Their stories are usually set in Atlanta or the surrounding cities. Having them out of their element in some place that is beautiful — one of my favorite places on Earth is in north Georgia in the foothills of the Appalachians — that was a real delight to write about. I love the idea of them not only being out of their element but being surrounded by such a beautiful landscape.

I’m guessing you had fun writing about the dysfunctional McAlpine family, who run the lodge where Will and Sara are staying.

It was. I’m always interested in families who are part of a family business. And part of that is because my dad for many years owned a coin laundry and my sister worked for it. So I loved the idea of a family business, but obviously in a thriller you can’t have people getting along, and they’re a particularly toxic family. As a writer it was fun to try and make them nuanced enough in the ways they were bad so that it felt like this sort of claustrophobic, psychological torture going on.

The book is called "This Is Why We Lied," and these characters, even Will and Sara, certainly do lie.

Many years ago I was talking to a police officer about the hardest part of her job, and she said the hardest part is that everybody lies and they don’t always know that they’re lying or they’re really just trying to help or they’re hiding something because it has nothing to do with the crime or they’re hiding something because it has everything to do with the crime. … That really stuck with me all these years and I’ve always wanted to write that kind of locked door mystery, where you have all these set number of suspects trapped in one place. I love Agatha Christie. So this was a great opportunity to take Will and Sara and put them on the top of a mountain and have a little fun playing with that trope of having all these people trapped in one place.

What made you decide to use letters written by the murder victim to her son as a plot device?

I didn’t want to have Mercy just die and let her disappear from the page. The way to bring her back was to have these letters, and the letters are written to the person she loved most of all in her life and who she feels responsible for protecting and that’s her son. So I thought have her write these letters and address them to John, but then John could never see these letters because they’re all so deeply personal. That was the emotional hook into them, but the crime writer part of me thought this will be a good way to put some clues in plain sight.

Do you have any involvement with the television series?

I do. The people running the show are very collaborative with me. They ask me questions about the characters. They try to include me in stuff that the cast does. So I feel really fortunate that they not only respect me but they respect the books and the characters. And I couldn’t be more tickled with what Ramón [Rodríguez] is doing and I think he’s absolutely captured the heart of the character.

This is your first time on Long Island in over a decade. Do you remember your last visit here?

I mostly remember just how beautiful it was. Being from the South, we always hear these horrible things about other states. … There are all these erroneously held stereotypes about Long Islanders and I just thought it was such a beautiful place and it has all these lovely little villages. So I’m just excited to go back.