“I thought I knew the story of Truman Capote and Harper Lee. I was wrong. Kim Powers brilliantly brings their strange relationship alive in a way a standard-issue biography never could. Weaving together fact, speculation and fantasy, he creates a sort of emotional biography that will haunt you long after the last page...just as the ghosts of the slain Clutters must have haunted them.”
--- Oscar Hijuelos, Pulitzer Prize winner for The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love and Mr. Ives’ Christmas

Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story imagines the final years of Truman Capote and Harper Lee, and the mysterious falling out between two of the twentieth century’s most celebrated authors.

Twenty-five years after growing up in the same backwoods Southern town, Capote and Lee’s lives were headed in different directions. He had taken New York’s literary world by storm and emerged as one of the greatest living writers. She was still struggling to put pen to page. An unlikely reunion in the desolate plains of Kansas resulted in Capote writing In Cold Blood and soon sparked questions. Who actually wrote To Kill a Mockingbird? How did these two childhood neighbors come to be so acclaimed yet so cryptic? And why did they stop speaking to one another?

In the recent Academy Award-winning film Capote, we got a small glimpse of the legends. But until now, we haven’t been able to imagine the “what might have been” that Kim Powers provides. In Capote in Kansas, Powers conjures a death-bed confession from the pilled, boozed, and wilting Capote, in which he picks up the phone to Harper Lee one final time. In Power’s tale, during the last years of his life, Capote sends a series of sinister and secretive packages to Lee, who had fled from fame as quickly as it had finally found her. And the ghosts of the murdered Clutters in Capote’s bestselling book appear one by one to their creator, demanding the privacy they lost the minute In Cold Blood hit shelves. In Capote in Kansas, Powers has created an unforgettable tale of ghosts, both figuratively and literally, and the decline of an enigmatic friendship.