Sara Paretsky in Town

Categories: In the News , Fiction

Bestselling author Sara Paretsky will be in town next week, speaking at a program and book signing sponsored by the library on Thursday, January 17. 

She’s most famous of course as one of the “founding mothers” of crime fiction.  Her mystery series featuring Chicago private detective V. I. Warshawski  was one of the first to feature a female p.i., showing that a woman detective could be as at home on the mean streets as at the tea table.

In her latest novel, Bleeding Kansas, she returns to her roots for an eerie story of neighbor turned against neighbor.  Like her other non-series novel, the 1998 Ghost Country, the story is a showcase for her passionate social convictions.   

Paretsky draws on the legacy of violence in her home state—both the bloody battle over slavery in Kansas in the 1850s and the Civil Rights struggle and generational divide of the 1960s and 1970s. 

The novel’s contemporary story parallels those historic conflicts.  Paretsky sees another generation bitterly divided, this time over religious convictions, sexual practices, and the war in Iraq.

The Schapens are stern in their religious beliefs.  Myra, the matriarch of the family is notorious for her bitter condemnation of her neighbors’ sins—and the sinners.  The Grelliers have no such convictions.  Jim just wants to get along with everyone; Susan flits from enthusiasm to enthusiasm; their teenagers, Chip and Lara are embarrassed by them both and floundering over their own futures. 

When an outsider, Gina Haring, moves into the abandoned farmhouse next door, she becomes the focus of controversy.  She’s urban, Wiccan, lesbian, and a peace activist—her beliefs and lifestyle could hardly be more offensive to Myra and many of her other new neighbors.

When Susan joins in Gina’s pagan bonfire ritual and campaigns with Gina against the war in Iraq, the conflict in her own family is exacerbated.  Chip enlists in the army; Lara rebels, secretly taking up with the youngest Schapen boy.  And of course the conflict within the community erupts in a tragic conflagration.

Paretsky’s cautionary tale of intolerance is harshly larger-than-life.   She twines into her almost gothic tale an ironic subplot about the “perfect red heifer” of Jewish tradition, the foretold precursor of the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem.

The novel is very different in tone and setting than Paretsky's Warshawski novels.  But it will leave readers with a shiver.