No Saints in Kansas by Amy Brashear (review)

The murder of the Clutter family in 1959, though seemingly fully researched and put to bed in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, is reimagined here through the eyes of Carly Fleming, a fictional neighbor girl who, as a transplant from New York City, has never managed to shed her outsider status in Holcomb, Kansas. The night before the murder, however, Nancy Clutter makes an unexpected overture of true friendship to Carly, so when Nancy is killed along with her family, a sense of unfinished business propels Carly to investigate. At first, she tries to clear Nancy's boyfriend, the last person known to have been in the house before the murders, but her efforts then transfer the town's suspicion onto her. After the two alleged killers are arrested, her father (real-life attorney Arthur Fleming) is called upon to defend one of the men and Carly becomes the high school pariah. The effects on the family of a lawyer defending a high-profile, universally despised client are a running theme, as her father's history with a similar case in New York is what prompted their move to Kansas in the first place. Carly's drive to be involved is credibly complex as a response to the complicated grief of losing the possibility of a friendship, as an identification with Nancy as a murder victim too close for comfort, and as a desire to finally find her place in an insular small town. She does some impulsively foolhardy and illegal things that enable readers to know more about the case than they might otherwise, and there is a strong critique of both Capote's methods and motives as he and Harper Lee dig for dirt. Readers who have never heard of the Clutter murders will get the full story and then some. KC