Bleeding Kansas Hardback - 2008

'For all the acts of cruelty committed between its covers, Sara Paretsky's BLEEDING KANSAS (Putnam, $25.95) might as well have been a crime novel requiring the services of her series sleuth, V. I. Warshawski. Set in the rural Kaw River Valley, where the author grew up, and sparked by a feud between two families that pioneered this farm region during the 1850s, the multigenerational narrative bristles with the kind of prickly social issues that give substance to Paretsky's detective stories. But the pointed absence of her Chicago private eye may indicate that some of the social conflicts currently polarizing the American heartland can't be resolved in the fair-and-square manner of genre tradition.

The blood-boiling issue in Bleeding Kansas is religious intolerance. Bigotry comes naturally to the members of the Schapen clan, who worship at the Salvation Through the Blood of Jesus Full Bible Church and become apoplectic when Gina Haring, a New York lesbian and New Age Wiccan, moves into an old farmhouse and attempts to practice her beliefs. When they aren't harassing Gina as a ''sodomite,'' Myra Schapen and her belligerent brood are railing against the ''communist'' notion of a co-op farmers' market and hatching plots to undermine their neighbors, the Grelliers, whose more tolerant ways just plain get under their skin.

Any inclination on the part of the reader to sympathize with the Schapens (for being born and bred stupid) in this barnyard feud are wiped out when Chip Grellier, who joins the Army after being suspended from school for a fight started by his Schapen tormentors, is killed in Iraq. But the Schapens do provide much black humor by breeding the ''perfect red heifer'' referred to in the Old Testament, creating an international storm that ensnares both fundamentalist Christians and ultraorthodox Jews.

Paretsky takes care to ground her story in the regional history of Kansas, where battles over slavery were fought to the death in the 1850s and neighbor turned against neighbor more than a century later over issues like racism, women's rights and Vietnam. Kansas, Paretsky suggests, is no freak offspring in our union of states. Rather, it's a microcosm of a nation at war with itself.'
New York Times