Karin Slaughter has cats in her home. In fact her Twitter account has this picture---
I lost the link to this interview with her, by John Connolly; it gives us a biographical perspective:
'...Slaughter is a petite 32-year-old native of Georgia and is also, by general agreement, the next big thing in crime fiction. ...
'Slaughter grew up in the town of Jonesboro, about 20 kilometres south of Atlanta. "It's a very small town, or it was when I was living there. Now it's been sucked into Atlanta, like most suburbs. There was a main street, very much like the one I write about, with a courthouse and an ice-cream parlour and the law office. I always knew if I did something wrong and someone saw me, then my parents would find out by the time I got home, which is a horrible way to grow up."
'Following her parents' divorce, she moved to the university town of Morrow, eventually going on to college there before dropping out when she was told that she could not keep taking English literature courses alone. (Slaughter is, it's worth noting, very southern, explaining at one point how a lot of "Yankees" have come to Georgia to study, attracted by the state's lottery-funded scholarship programme. "Subsequently, the standards at our state universities have dropped considerably," she concludes, and it's hard to tell if she's joking or not.)
'After dropping out of college she supported herself by working as a signwriter while also completing a succession of novels destined, it seems, never to reside on a bookstore shelf, among them If Cats Had Thumbs ....[S]he says that the two books that most influenced her during puberty were Helter Skelter, the story of the Manson family murders, and Gone With The Wind ....
'"I was also influenced by Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor, that sort of thing," she says. When asked why southern writers appear to have a very distinctive voice, and a very strong influence on those who fall under their sway, she replies, with a hint of tongue-in-cheek, that "we're just better. When Walker Percy won the Pulitzer prize, people asked him what made southern writers better than other American writers, and he said because we've had the Fall'. We lost the war. We also have a very strong sense of oral history. There's always a story behind even the simplest of things. The whole way that southern writers focus on characterisation in the story comes from that oral history.
'"I think that every writer is a regional writer, and to deny that denies who you are as a writer. I mean you really have to stay where you're from and write what you know.It's really popular now for writers to move to the south and say that they're southern writers but, as we say, just because a cat has kittens in the oven it doesn't make them biscuits."....
'With the third novel featuring her central trio already complete and a fourth, Indelible, in progress, Slaughter seems set to consolidate her already growing reputation. While a futuristic novel called The Recidivists is also planned, and she is currently editing a short story collection entitled Like A Charm, she shows no signs of abandoning the crime genre.
'"I think that literary fiction, particularly in America, has got to the point where the less it is about, the more it is lauded critically, and you have to tell a story. What's the point if you're not telling a story? If you're not asking a question at the beginning that's answered by the end, then what purpose are you serving? It's not telling me anything new about the human condition, and I think that crime fiction is doing that. It is asking, and attempting to answer, a lot of the difficult questions in society at the moment. Violence is such a part of our culture, and people want to know why."
'[Her debut novel,]Blindsighted.. has just been published in paperback.'
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