"I made a pledge I would never have a scene where a man comes in and saves the woman," Slaughter says. "The woman would always save herself, sometimes she would save the man and the man would be very grateful."

Slaughter, 46, is the author of 16 bestselling crime novels. When she published her first, Blindsighted, in 2001, there weren't many women writing crime, let alone writing strong women.

"When I first started people kept saying to me, 'Why do you write about strong women?' It was such a strange question. No one says to Lee Child or Mike Connelly, 'Why do you write about strong men?' as if it was some sort of anomaly. If you look around in real life, strong women are everywhere."

Slaughter's latest book The Good Daughter features several. It's the story of the Quinn family, sisters Charlotte and Samantha, their parents, their small home town. When a terrifying attack shatters their world, the family is shattered, and now, 28 years later, another terrifying attack draws them back together.

It's a clever book, told from different points of view, in different times. It keeps you guessing right to the end. And makes you guess again.

The relationship between the sisters is at the core of the story, at times volatile, at times heart-wrenching. Both have been through hell, and have come back out just a little broken, but stronger for it.

Slaughter says she found herself questioning the book during the writing. "I started writing the book and then November happened [and Donald Trump was elected president] and I looked at the world a little differently after that," she says.

"One thing it made clear is a lot more people than I thought don't respect women. We've got our pussy grabber in chief over here in America. With Trump it's the last gasp of the old white man trying to keep women and minorities in their place."

She was angered when Trump called Hillary Clinton "a nasty woman" during one of the debates. "I thought are you kidding me! She's being put down because she's not womanly enough or ladylike?"

As well as politics, she's happy to talk about world events, about terrorism, white nationalists, gender inequity – she calls Australia out here, referring to the Liberal fundraising dinner party menu which referenced then Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

"You wouldn't get people making fun of stereotypes of Aboriginal people … that would be wholly unacceptable."

But mainly she's happy to talk about writing, about her books.

"I love the crime genre. I think you'd be hard pressed … to name a book that has endured that doesn't have some kind of crime. Gone with the Wind has a murder, The Great Gatsby has murder, Crime and Punishment has so much crime they put it in the title.

"The universal thing we're all afraid of is being victimised and I think it's cathartic to read these crime novels, especially hybrid ones such as The Good Daughter, when you have that resolution, you have the feeling that the world makes sense now because the bad guys got caught and punished. In real life that doesn't often happen."

She doesn't have much trouble coming up with new crimes, it's how she works characters into them that's the tricky bit. She has two series: the Will Trent books and the Grant County series. Her latest two, Pretty Girls and The Good Daughter were stand-alone books, both featuring a strong set of sisters. Pretty Girls was a New York Times bestseller.

But she can guarantee there is no new way to write about murder.

"When I write something, sometimes I've heard a story or a police officer has told me something or I read a case file and I incorporate details into the book.

"Sometimes I've come up with what I thought was a wholly original murder and invariably a reader will write to me and say, 'Oh, did you base this on a case that happened in Canada a few years ago?'

"On the one hand I think I'm never going to come up with something original and on the other I think, crap, I think like a sadistic murderer."

The Good Daughter is published by HarperCollins at $32.99.