Below is the complete list of Karin Slaughter’s North Falls Thriller books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.
North Falls Thriller Books
About North Falls Thriller
Karin Slaughter’s North Falls books mark the beginning of a new crime-thriller line set in the fictional North Falls region and centered on Officer Emmy Cliffton and her family. On Slaughter’s official site, North Falls is presented as a distinct series, separate from Grant County and Will Trent, which immediately tells you this is not just a one-off standalone with sequel potential but a newly established branch of her fiction.
What gives the series its identity is the setting. North Falls is a small-town thriller world, which means the danger is shaped as much by intimacy as by violence. In a place where everyone thinks they know everyone else, disappearance, suspicion, and buried history hit harder because the town’s relationships are already tangled before the crime begins. That is the emotional territory Slaughter has always handled well, and North Falls appears to lean into it from the start.
The opening novel, We Are All Guilty Here, establishes that mood clearly. Slaughter’s official page describes it as a story in which two teenage girls go missing and Officer Emmy Cliffton has very personal reasons for wanting to find them. That premise matters because it signals the series is not built around a detached investigator solving tidy cases from the outside. Emmy is already emotionally implicated, and that usually means a more bruising, character-driven kind of thriller rather than a purely procedural one.
At the moment, this is still a very young series, and that is useful context for readers coming to it now. Official and major book listings identify We Are All Guilty Here as North Falls book one, and current series listings also show a second novel, The Secrets We Hide, as the next installment. That makes North Falls less a long-developed universe than a newly launched one with its shape only beginning to emerge.
Even so, the early signs of the series’ character are already clear. This looks like Slaughter working in a mode that combines small-town claustrophobia with family entanglement and missing-person urgency. Emmy Cliffton’s role suggests that the books will be held together not just by geography, but by one central figure whose professional life and private life are likely to collide in painful ways. That gives North Falls a different starting energy from Will Trent, which is more established and institution-driven, and from Grant County, which built its weight over time.
Beneath an already completed list, the best way to understand the North Falls Thriller books is as Karin Slaughter’s newer small-town crime series: personal, secretive, and built around a community where disappearance and guilt ripple outward through people who are already too close to one another. The line is still early in its life, but the core appeal is already visible: Emmy Cliffton, a town full of hidden pressure, and a thriller framework that treats family and local history as part of the danger, not just the background.