Author’s note

Dear Reader,

On November 15, 1959, a family of four was brutally murdered in the quiet town of Holcomb, Kansas. The Clutters—Herbert, Bonnie, Kenyon, and Nancy—were shot execution-style in their own home. The senseless crime made national news. It quickly attracted the attention of a writer from New York City, Truman Capote, who traveled to Holcomb to investigate. The book he wrote about that experience, In Cold Blood, has since become a classic.

In 1991, at the age of nine, I moved to Garden City. It’s only six minutes from Holcomb, but a metropolis by comparison. Everyone was eager to talk about the Clutters, pillars of the Holcomb community. The first person we met at church mentioned that her husband was a relative of Bobby Rupp, one of the original suspects. It was a strange introduction to a place I’d call home. I began to wonder how Holcomb might feel to a newcomer, like me, at the time of the murders. When I finally read In Cold Blood, that wonder turned into a consuming interest—and ultimately inspiration.

The result is teenager Carly Fleming. She’s one of the few fictional characters in a novel otherwise populated by the real people who are forever seared in the nation’s memory—the victims, their friends, the police, the investigators, Truman Capote and his friend Harper Lee . . . even Arthur Fleming, one of the real-life court appointed attorneys for the culprits. In my novel he is Carly’s father.

I remain grateful to the woman we met at church that day because she also made me fall in love with a phrase that stuck with me when I read In Cold Blood for the first time: “Out there.” It showed me the truth about how lonely home can feel—anyplace where the fence posts are all the same height, where the wind always blows the same way—in the wake of tragedy.

 

With thanks,

Amy Brashear