This Is Why We Lied

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 5

Chapters 6-9

Chapters 10-13

Chapters 14-17

Chapters 18-23

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Background

Series Context: The Will Trent Series

This Is Why We Lied is Karin Slaughter’s 24th novel and the 12th full-length novel in the Will Trent series. Triptych, published in 2006, introduced readers to Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) agent Will Trent. Although each novel can be read as a stand-alone mystery, the series offers an overarching story arc that centers on the character development of Will, his friends, and his colleagues.

Sara Linton, the GBI medical examiner and Will’s wife in This Is Why We Lied, is one of the main characters from Slaughter’s Grant County series of novels. Sara first appears in the third Will Trent novel, Undone, published in 2009. Over the next several novels, Will and Sara’s relationship developed, and this novel takes place during their honeymoon.

Will’s childhood is an important part of this long arc, beginning with his mother, Lucy Morales. Over the series, his story emerges: Amanda, Will’s current boss, was a police officer when she discovered baby Will in a trashcan near his dead mother’s body. Will remains unaware of this connection for much of his life, but Amanda is a mother figure who plays a prominent part in his life and the series. Family is an important component of the series, including Will’s found family of Amanda, Faith, and Sara (and even including his ex-wife, Angie). Like Dave in This Is Why We Lied, Angie was at the children’s home with Will, and their on-again, off-again relationship spans their lifetimes until their divorce.

Will’s background at the children’s home is especially pertinent in This Is Why We Lied, when Will connects with his past in several ways. He takes Sara there for their honeymoon because it was a place he longed to go to when he was at the home. Once there, he reconnects with his childhood nemesis, and his old biases lead him to assume that Dave is the antagonist in the present as well. By the end of the novel, Will sets aside that painful part of his past, instead choosing to focus on his future with Sara.

In addition to the Will Trent and Grant County series, Karin Slaughter has authored many other novels, including Pretty Girls (2015), The Good Daughter (2017), Pieces of Her (2018), and False Witness (2021).

Genre Context: Police Procedural Meets Locked-Room Mystery

Slaughter’s Will Trent novels are usually police procedurals, a subgenre of the crime/mystery genre. Police procedurals characteristically have a dark tone and feature graphically violent crimes. Novels in this subgenre are portraits of a crime’s investigation, in this case by GBI agent Will Trent and his team. The genre follows professional investigators at work and includes technical detail about investigative process and procedure. This Is Why We Lied stays true to Slaughter’s Will Trent series as a police procedural, but Slaughter blends it with another popular subgenre: the locked-room mystery.

The term “locked-room mystery” describes two separate though related subgenres that have evolved over time. Originally, locked room mysteries were clever puzzles that featured a crime inside a literal locked room, which readers solved using clues in the text. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) is generally credited as the first example of this genre; other early examples include two Sherlock Holmes stories: “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (1892) and “The Adventure of the Empty House.” However, over time, “locked-room mystery” has acquired a more general sense as a mystery in which the crime, the victim(s), and the potential suspects are isolated in an inaccessible or remote location. Agatha Christie popularized this type of locked-room mystery via several novels, including And Then There Were None and Murder on the Orient Express.

Although Slaughter delivers This Is Why We Lied in the police procedural style characteristic of the Will Trent series, she sets the mystery at the remote McAlpine Lodge deep in the Georgia mountains, which is barely accessible by road and at which communication with the outside world is sporadic. As in other locked room mysteries, the novel features an isolated cast of characters, although at a later point, fellow investigators access the property. Another popular element of this type of mystery is an atmospheric setting, and McAlpine Lodge provides this element too, featuring a main building, cabins, and outbuildings strung along trails that wind through the mountains and around a lake. Slaughter makes this genre connection clear when she explicitly refers to Agatha Christie: “No one wanted to get trapped inside an Agatha Christie novel” (43). Slaughter’s unique blend of these two subgenres increases tension as the locked-room elements obstruct the normal progression of a police procedural.