We Are All Guilty Here

• Author: Karin Slaughter
• Genre: Mystery
• Publication Date: August 12, 2015
• Publisher: William Morrow
• Series: North Falls #1

Thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The first thrilling mystery in the new North Falls series from Karin Slaughter, New York Times bestselling author of Pretty Girls and the Will Trent series.

Welcome to North Falls—a small town where everyone knows everyone. Or so they think.

Until the night of the fireworks. When two teenage girls vanish, and the town ignites.

For Officer Emmy Clifton, it’s personal. She turned away when her best friend’s daughter needed help—and now she must bring her home.

But as Emmy combs through the puzzle the girls left behind, she realizes she never really knew them. Nobody did.

Every teenage girl has secrets. But who would kill for them? And what else is the town hiding?

It’s no secret around here that I love Karin Slaughter books. I flew through both the Grant County and Will Trent series, and still can’t get enough of her writing. It feels like just yesterday that I realized I haven’t seen any new Slaughter books and discovered this one, the start of a brand-new series.

The story takes place in the town of North Falls, Georgia, a small rural town where everyone knows each other. But if reading this genre has taught me one thing, small towns are full of secrets. North Falls seems to have more of its share—two teenage girls go missing on the night of July 4th, during the fireworks show. And the evidence that Officer Emmy Clifton uncovers makes her wonder whether she knew the girls at all, and who else she doesn’t know amongst these people she’s spent her entire life around.

Early in the story, we realize that the name Clifton is like royalty in this small Georgia town, with much of the town made up by two different branches of Cliftons (the rich Cliftons and the poor Cliftons). Emmy is the youngest of four children born to the town sheriff, and she’s been doted on by her parents even as her father is preparing her to take over as his replacement whenever he steps down. 

In addition to being a police officer, Emmy is a daughter, a sister, a friend, a mother, and a safe space for the people in her life to come to, even if they just want to talk. On the night of the fireworks, she was at the show with everyone, including her husband and young son. During what seems to be a frequent rehash of the same argument, Emmy storms away towards the bathroom nearly in tears. When her friend’s daughter Madison asks to speak to her, Emmy blows her off so that she can get her own emotions in check. But when Madison is one of the two girls who disappear, Emmy is pulled in different directions—giving her all to this case while also holding at bay her issues with her mother’s rapidly accelerating dementia and the problems in her marriage and with her best friend in the whole world. 

Emmy is such an easy character to empathize with. She’s loyal and devoted, and very thorough in her work. She isn’t immune to the effects of guilt, both from blowing off Madison’s request to talk and her own divided attention: she’s got a mother who is having fewer and fewer good days and more commonly fails to recognize her, marital issues, and other family troubles. This case places her in a difficult situation, and forces her to race against the clock. Additionally, she has a great learning relationship with her father—they have clearly defined boundaries that allow them to keep their personal and professional matters separate. On top of all of that, she works in a male-dominated field surrounded by people who have known Emmy all her life, and in a place as small as North Falls, things can get informal pretty quick, and Emmy has to remind characters more than once to call her by her job title rather than her first name, something that didn’t happen when her father was in her position.

I honestly thought this was going to be the whole story, but after a rollercoaster of tension and plot twists throughout the first third of the book, it quickly becomes apparent that this isn’t the whole story. In the second part of the story, Emmy has to come to some hard realizations. First is that both of her parents are heading downhill, second is that she missed something in the disappearance of those two teens, and the third would be a huge spoiler if I were to share it (which I won’t because we don’t do spoilers here).  

This book was full of unpredictable plot twists and uncovered secrets that I never expected. And just when I thought that there couldn’t be any more plot twists or secrets revealed, Slaughter went and blew my mind. She’s earned every bit of her accolades for her writing, and I was thrilled to see her not just meet my high expectations, but fly straight past them. 

Overall, this is a fantastic read. The pacing in the middle of the story was a little bit slower, but there was plenty of tension to keep me intrigued and reading. It also allowed for the fullness of the characters to develop, and show the interactions between them all which help to fully round the characters and prevent any of them from being flat. It was almost impossible for me to figure out who the ‘bad guy’ was in this novel, and it left me even more excited for the new direction that Slaughter’s work is heading in. She even incorporated some humor in the story, which felt new to me (but it has been a while since I read her other books). It feels like her work has only improved with each new release, and I know I’ll be so ready for the next book in this series.

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