No Saints in Kansas: A Novel by Amy Brashear. Soho Teen (an imprint of Soho Press), November, 2017. Young adult historical fiction.When Truman Capote penned the classic In Cold Blood about the murders of the Clutter family in 1959 Holcomb, Kansas, it launched a new genre of true crime writing. Brashear spent much of her childhood in nearby Garden City, Kansas and has chosen to set her debut novel in the area and to base it on the Clutter murders, the community of Holcomb, and characters who might have lived there then.
When Carly Fleming and her family move from New York to Kansas, she is an outsider who badly wants to fit in. She tutors Nancy Clutter. After Nancy is killed, Carly tries to defend Nancy's boyfriend, Bobby, who is a suspect at first. Carly does not like to be compared to Nancy Drew, but she does manage to find clues, the piece together evidence, to meet Truman Capote, Nelle Lee, and Richard Avedon, and even one of the real killers. She learns the importance of family, what it means to be a true friend, and that the wind in Kansas winters is not the only thing that can give a person chills.
The novel is full of high school students and their typical petty jealousy. It reads authentically though and will send generations of new readers to the Capote nonfiction book. Kudos to Amy Brashear.
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