Best books … chosen by Karin Slaughter

Karin Slaughter is the best-selling author of a series of acclaimed suspense novels set in fictional Grant County, Ga. Her latest book, Fractured, sends homicide detective Will Trent into Atlanta.

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain (Echo, $10). Twain’s last published novel and, by his account, his best work. He was fascinated by his subject and investigated St. Joan’s life for more than a decade before writing her story.

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Flannery O’Connor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $15). One of my favorite lines about Southern writers comes from this collection of essays: “Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.” Here we are more than 40 years later, and I wonder sometimes how much has changed.

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