Review by New York Times Review
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. Frank Tallis returns to the glory days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in VIENNA BLOOD (Random House, paper, $15), when fin de siècle Europe looked to the glittering Hapsburg capital for the latest advances in science, philosophy and the arts. In this fine sequel to "A Death in Vienna," the cafes, concert houses and lecture halls are still bustling with creative energy. But rumblings of anti-Semitism are growing louder, and the suppression of secret societies like the Freemasons has only led to the proliferation of all manner of underground groups, subversive and otherwise. "There was something about this city," Tallis explains, "that attracted intrigue, conspiracy and sedition." Forbidden public assembly, some groups, like the Psychological Society that convenes weekly at the home of Sigmund Freud, simply hold their meetings in private. But one cabal with a sinister agenda of Germanic supremacy has given purpose to a serial killer whose terrible handiwork leads Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt to consult with his friend, the psychologist Max Liebermann, on a clinical profile of the murderer. The professional rapport and easy friendship of this duo lend a bit of quiet charm to a series that, rather like a Viennese pastry, is stuffed almost to bursting with showy delights. John Turner, the deep-thinking sheriff's deputy in James Sallis's SALT RIVER (Walker, $21.95), comes by his existential melancholy honorably, through circumstances narrated in the two previous books in this haunting series. While there are crimes to be solved in the backwater town outside Memphis where Turner once thought he could shake the big-city blues - for one thing, his best friend is wanted for murder - they mostly resolve themselves. This leaves Turner free to adopt a philosophy for sustaining himself through his losses: "Sometimes you just have to see how much music you can make with what you have left." Sallis writes poetic rings around the subject, brooding on a grasshopper that takes off "with a thrill of wings" even as he lets an old man explain how he manages to keep faith with a town that has lost every last one of its Democrats. And with all the bad weather in this book, it's good to know that the last storm is a cleansing one. "In York Station, the gas lamps were all lit." With that discreet opening sentence, Andrew Martin draws readers of THE LOST LUGGAGE PORTER (Harvest/Harcourt, paper, $14) into the romance, mystery and danger of the railroad age. It's 1906 and Jim Stringer, the young engine man who came by his exciting job in "The Necropolis Railway" (and lost it in "The Blackpool Highflyer"), has just been hired as a detective by the North Eastern Railway Police. While the work is not nearly as satisfying as stoking the fires of the great steam engines, it does put him in their vicinity. And once Jim goes undercover, joining a gang of murderous thieves that's plundering the yard, he is able to look into the darkest corners of York's vast railway station. But no matter how deeply Jim plunges into the poverty and filth of England's industrial age, he never loses his sense of wonder at the monstrous beauty of its great machines. Sara Paretsky's latest novel bristles with prickly social issues, but V.I. Warshawski is nowhere to be seen.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
In only her second non-V. I. Warshawski novel, Paretsky returns to her Kansas roots with an exploration of heartland violence and redemption. The Grellier and Schapen families have farmed the Kaw Valley since the 1850s, but long-lasting grudges have created conflicts almost as fierce as those between the anti- and pro-slavery forces in the mid-nineteenth century. That historical legacy and the divisive political battles of the 1960s and 1970s frame current conflicts, now tinged by religious fervor. Woven into this fabric of unrest are the fate of a perfect red calf, required by conservative Jews for rebuilding the temple, and a diary written by Abigail Grellier detailing her early tumultuous years in Lawrence. When Gina Haring, descendent of another long-established family, arrives to reinvent herself in her crumbling ancestral home, issues come to a head. Violence, tragic death, and fire eventually bring resolution. Paretsky's familiar social and political themes intolerance, feminism, family figure prominently, but characters drive the novel. They wrestle with thorny dilemmas, and no one escapes unscathed. In words, images, and the cadences of midwestern speech, Paretsky paints the landscape of the Kansas prairie and the cycles of the land in this memorable and tragic tale. For fans of character-centered, issue-driven, evocative novels of the plains, such as Nancy Pickard's Virgin of Small Plains (2006), Jim Harrison's Dalva (1988), and Kent Haruf's Plainsong (1999).--Saricks, Joyce Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestseller Paretsky, who has tackled weighty issues in her V.I. Warshawski detective series (e.g., the Holocaust in Total Recall), weaves a gripping contemporary novel around three farm families-the Grelliers, Fremantles and Schapens-that can trace their Kaw Valley, Kans., roots back to the 1850s, a time of violent clashes between antislavery and proslavery forces in "Bleeding Kansas." Their shared history is no buffer against the storm of changes that begin with the arrival of Gina Haring, a lesbian Wiccan. Chip Grellier, after being expelled from high school, enlists in the army and is killed in Iraq with devastating effects on his family. The Schapens' fundamentalist doctrines come to the fore when they discover "a perfect red heifer" in their dairy herd that may be a path to riches as well as to the second coming. Meanwhile, Gina stirs prejudices and passions to a fever pitch. Paretsky taps a different vein and strikes gold in this timely tale of fear and conflict in heartland America. Author tour. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In Kaw River Valley, where Paretsky has roots, the self-righteous Schapens duke it out with the self-righteous Grelliers until one son's death in Iraq changes the mood. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The creator of V.I. Warshawski (Fire Sale, 2005, etc.) tells the story of three deep-rooted farm families in Lawrence, Kan., whose troubled interactions seem to recapitulate the state's violent history. The families include the fundamentalist Schapens, in this generation represented by matriarch Myra, her deputy-sheriff son, Arnie, and his boys Junior, a football bully, and Robbie, his favorite target; the left-liberal Grelliers, represented by Jim and Susan and their children Chip (n Etienne), 18, and Lara, 15; and the lordly Fremantles, who were the town's first family but in this generation are all but gone. Trouble seems to begin with two new arrivals to the community: Gina Haring, the recently divorced niece of John Fremantle's late wife, invited to live in his home, and Nasya, the solid red calf Robbie's bred who could just turn out to become the ritual sacrifice necessary for the Jewish dream of establishing the Second Temple in Jerusalem. (Note: Ancient Jewish prophecy states that the Second Temple, destroyed in 70 CE, can be rebuilt only under the direction of a rabbi purified by the ashes of an unblemished red cow sacrificed at three years of age; Christian prophecy, meanwhile, states that the Second Coming won't happen until the destruction of this Second Temple.) Gina encourages Susan Grellier, already reviled on Myra Schapen's vitriolic right-wing blog for her experiments in organic farming and communal marketing, to join her circle of Wicca dancers. Over at the Schapens, a trio of rabbis keeps checking up on Nasya to make sure she's still unblemished and worthy of being sacrificed, and Robbie finally confesses his love to Lara Grellier. Paretsky expands this family saga in two ways. She broadens its scope to include contemporary conflicts over the Iraq war, and she adds just enough historical retrospective, in the form of extracts from the diary Abigail Grellier kept from 1855 to 1863, to show that the irruption of Gina Haring and Nasya the golden calf didn't so much create conflict as expose fault lines that had run through the community from the beginning. Big, ambitious and heartfelt. If it's less fully achieved than V.I.'s adventures, Paretsky's fans will probably devour it anyway. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
