BLOODY KANSAS

A pair of twisted and traumatized souls violently collide in post–Civil War Kansas in Shotton and Kishbaugh’s historical novel.

Whether one responds to heartbreaking tragedy and unacceptable injustice like a saint or a sinner might very well come down to a little luck and a simple matter of degree. Emory O’Dell and Abigail Waldron—the central figures revolving around each other in this superbly rendered look into the darkest recesses of the human heart—have definitely been tested, and both have chosen supremely cynical paths. Emory is Parsons, Kansas’ most prominent citizen and owner of Martha’s Garden, a dusty sharecropper farm that, despite the 13th Amendment, still operates like a slavery plantation. Any possibility that the wealthy landowner might discover an untapped vein of goodness buried somewhere deep in the fiber of his being was dashed years earlier when a freakish twister took the lives of his beloved wife and daughter. Abigail answers Emory’s advertisement soliciting domestic help some years after the fatal event, and she immediate gives the craven character the idea that he could get more out of his new hireling than just clean linen. What Emory doesn’t know is that after surviving monstrous assaults by the men in her life, Abigail has grown just as corrupt and sinister as he. Shotton and Kishbaugh consistently provide readers with clear insight into both Emory and Abigail’s inner machinations: “It didn’t matter if what Abby said was true, or even if she believed it. The only thing that mattered was Abby needed help with one more thing. If it took Mrs. Sullivan believing they were peers to get it, so be it.” This keen and unnerving understanding of the characters’ dark psyches packs the escalating tragedy with tremendous power as Emory and Abigail continue to jockey for power over one another—and everyone else around them (Non-nun-ge, Emory’s mute Osage enforcer, and Sojourner Bailey, the ex-slave dreaming of beating Emory at his own game, are mere pawns to the more powerful duo). Ultimately, any sense of justice these characters might find is left buried deep in the bloody Kansas soil.

Sharply drawn and brutally violent.