Karin Slaughter's 'Faithless'

(CBS)  Most authors believe in the adage "write what you know." But suspense writer Karin Slaughter believes in writing about what scares her most. "Faithless" is the fifth crime novel in her popular Grant County series.

Grant County is a collection of small towns she knew growing up in Georgia, she tells The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith, pointing out that it is a great place to find dastardly deeds.

"Being a Southerner, I'm interested in sex, violence, religion and all the things that make life interesting," she says.

Describing her book, she says it is about one of the scariest things she can think of: being buried alive and how fear affects a small community. Click here to read an excerpt.

Slaughter remembers being scared out of her wits as a young child.

"My dad believed in scaring us as we were growing up," she says. "Scaring the boys who wanted to date us more. But it was something he believed in doing. So he told us all these really scary stories. Some of them true, like this one; some, maybe not. I think we turned out all right because of it."

She was taken to a cemetery and there was a preacher who had been buried with a phone line coming out of his coffin, waiting for him to be resurrected. She remembered how scary it was for her, and she put it in this book.

There are graphic scenes in her books, which some writers choose to avoid. But she describes them in detail as a way to discuss social issues.

"I've always been interested in violence, even as a teenager," she says. "I loved 'Helter Skelter' and books like that. I think crime fiction is a great way to talk about social issues, whether 'To Kill A Mockingbird' or 'The Lovely Bones,' violence is a way to open up that information you want to get out to the reader. I think it's doing them a service to show what's actually going on, so they understand the characters more."

A major part of the book is concerned with violence against women.

"Women are interested in crime fiction," she says. "Focusing on the violence can be a negative, but I like to see it as a way of opening up a dialogue. When something bad (like violence against women) happens, we always strike at ourselves rather than at others. Violence against women happens to all kinds of women. They can be smart and tough; lawyers, judges."

In terms of research, she says she likes spending time doing it.

"I could probably get trapped doing research and never write another word," she says. "I think that crime writers have a lot of the same characteristics as serial killers because we want to know about crime. We maybe wanted to be a policeman at one time. So we're interested in the same things they are. Fortunately, we put it on the page."

Next for her in the Grant County series is a book entitled, "Skin Privilege" to be published in a couple of years.

"My next book is outside the series, new characters," she says. "It takes place in Atlanta (and) opens with a bludgeoning of a prostitute, which is great because you never see prostitutes in small towns."