cover image Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story

Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story

Kim Powers. Carroll & Graf Publishers, $25 (254pp) ISBN 978-0-7867-2033-0

Fans of In Cold Blood and To Kill a Mockingbird will welcome this off-beat novel from Powers (The History of Swimming) about the odd relationship between Truman Capote and Harper Lee. In an intriguing opening, Capote calls Lee late at night to relate his fears that he's being haunted by both the victims and the killers featured in his true-crime account of a brutal Kansas killing spree. Those calls trigger Lee's recollections of the twist and turns in their association, as well as the real-life antecedents for her novel about racism and justice in the South. The plot line concerning the haunting is secondary to the flashbacks, making the revelation of who's responsible for the haunting somewhat anticlimactic.