Karin Slaughter’s Crime Novel "Blindsighted" as a Southern Forensic Thriller

Abstract

The forensic thriller has emerged as a significant subgenre of crime fiction that depicts the work of medical examiners, coroners, forensic pathologists, and anthropologists who analyze scientific evidence. Forensic investigators do not engage directly in pursuing the criminal; instead, they interpret the physical evidence collected from the victim's body and the crime scene. The popularity of forensic fiction, film, and TV series has created the general assumption that criminalistics has become a routine police procedure. This article presents Karin Slaughter's novel Blindsighted as an example of the Southern forensic thriller. The American writer Karin Slaughter is the author of crime stories and thrillers set in the American South. Her Grant County series consists of six crime novels, beginning with Blindsighted and followed by Kisscut, A Faint Cold Fear, Indelible, Faithless, and Beyond Reach. The essay introduces the main qualities of a forensic thriller and highlights the novel's generic characteristics. Then, Blindsighted is analyzed within the paradigm of Southern regional literature, with its distinctive qualities and religious imagery.