FICTION: Bleeding Kansas, By Sara Paretsky, Hodder & Stoughton, 431pp. £16.99FOR CRIME fans - and are there more loyal readers in any genre? - Sara Paretsky means VI Warshawski, writes Bernice Harrison.
In 1982 she created the sassy Chicago female private eye and fans, of which I am one, have stayed with VI for a dozen novels, always finishing the latest with the silent wish that Paretsky would hurry up and deliver a follow- up.
Well her new novel is here, and for a diehard fan there's slight disappointment that not only has the location moved from the mean streets of downtown Chicago to the wide open plains of Kansas, but it's not even crime and there's no VI.
For all that, there is as much nastiness, ignorance and brutish violence in the bigoted world in Bleeding Kansas as in any anonymous city - Little House on the Prairie this ain't. The story is set in Kaw River Valley - a remote farming community where life is hard and neighbourliness not only valued but often life-saving - and it revolves around the lives of two families, the Grelliers and the Schapens. Their ancestors colonised the valley in the 1850s in an attempt to distance themselves from the spread of slavery in neighbouring states.
But the decades have prised open divisions between the families. The Grelliers, farmer Jim and his idealistic, history-obsessed, liberal wife, Susan, and their two teenage children, Chip and Lara, are good, decent, live-and-let-live types, eking out an increasingly difficult farming existence. The unruly, uncouth Schapens, ruled by embittered, gossip-mongering matriarch Myra, have hated the Grelliers since some minor slight generations ago and are quick to revel in any misfortune that should befall them.
But it being a rural community, and they being neighbours, the two families have reached a sort of silent agreement not to get in each other's way.
Their old neighbours, another first-settler family, the Freemantles, have already died out, leaving their magnificent Victorian house vacant and crumbling. The fragile peace between the families ends with the arrival to the old Freemantle house of Gina Haring, a sophisticated, bohemian divorcee from New York, who may or may not be a lesbian but who is, according to the small-minded Schapens, a dangerous heathen who practises witchcraft. And it's at a time when the Schapens are intensely interested in religion. Devout members of the fundamentalist Salvation Through the Blood of Jesus Full Bible Church, they see salvation of a financial kind when one of their cows gives birth to what they think may be the perfect red heifer, which in the Torah means the temple at Jerusalem can be rebuilt and Christ can return.
Susan Grellier becomes so fascinated with out-of-towner Gina she joins her anti-war lobby group, much to the mystification of her easy-going husband and hot-headed son, Chip. Rebelling against her, he runs away, joins the army and is sent to Iraq. The equilibrium of the valley is further disturbed with disastrous results, particularly for Susan and her sweetly capable teenage daughter, Lara. And these two, together with dependable Jim Grellier, are the most fully realised characters in a novel in which the bad guys sometimes are so bad it's difficult to see them as real people.
The location is one with which Paretsky is familiar - she grew up in Kew Valley, and the theme of the real power of evil will be familiar to readers of her crime novels, even if the location, the added history lesson - the title refers to the battles between anti-slavery free-staters and border ruffians over whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free or slave state - and the genre are so different.
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Bernice Harrison is an Irish Times journalist