The Grelliers and the Schapens are two families who have been farming in the Kaw River Valley for over a hundred and fifty years, their lives connected through the generations by history and geography. Gina Haring, bringing with her the liberal air of the big city, moves into a dilapidated house near both families' properties. Gina has secrets, her own reasons for being in the Kansas countryside, and they're not necessarily what the people around her imagine. Susan's involvement with her stirs up the wrath of the Schapen clan - and has cataclysmic results for her own family.
Sara Paretsky is a modern American author of detective fiction. Paretsky was raised in Kansas, and graduated from the state university with a degree in political science. She did community service work on the south side of Chicago in 1966 and returned in 1968 to work there. She ultimately completed a Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago, entitled The Breakdown of Moral Philosophy in New England Before the Civil War, and finally earned an MBA from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Married to a professor of physics at the University of Chicago, she has lived in Chicago since 1968.
The protagonist of all but two of Paretsky's novels is V.I. Warshawski, a female private investigator. Warshawski's eclectic personality defies easy categorization. She drinks Johnnie Walker Black Label, breaks into houses looking for clues, and can hold her own in a street fight, but also she pays attention to her clothes, sings opera along with the radio, and enjoys her sex life.
Paretsky is credited with transforming the role and image of women in the crime novel. The Winter 2007 issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection is devoted to her work.