North Falls

About the North Falls series

North Falls is Karin Slaughter's newest series, launched after the Will Trent novels, built around Emmy Clifton, a police officer in the small, tightly wound town of North Falls whose guilt over one failure to act shapes everything that follows. We Are All Guilty Here (2025) opens with two teenage girls vanishing on the night of the town's fireworks display, dragging Emmy's professional obligations into painful collision with a private failure years earlier, when she turned away from her best friend's daughter at the moment the girl needed her most. Slaughter's trademarks are all present — small-town institutions with something to protect, generational trauma that resurfaces at the worst possible moment, and violence against women rendered without euphemism — but North Falls trades the GBI/Atlanta scale of Will Trent for a tighter, more claustrophobic community focus.

The Secrets We Hide (2026) continues in North Falls with a new case that reopens old wounds along generational lines, deepening the town's web of buried family secrets. Two books in, the series reads as Slaughter working in a more intimate register than her Grant County or Will Trent novels: fewer institutional players, more of the town itself as a pressure cooker.

How to read this series

Read in publication order, starting with We Are All Guilty Here (2025). Emmy Clifton's guilt over the central event of the first book and her relationships in North Falls carry forward into The Secrets We Hide (2026), so reading in sequence is recommended even though each book's core mystery resolves on its own. This is a new, separate Karin Slaughter series with no characters or continuity shared with Grant County or Will Trent.