She couldn’t decide where Lara should be in the story. I’m clearly not alone in thinking this, as many people coming up to talk to Sara during our interview say so, too. While reading Bleeding Kansas I’d felt that 14-year-old Lara was very much a young V I Warshawski or Sara Paretsky herself. Unlike the V I books Sara wrote this one in the third person, and whereas she would normally use quite terse language (albeit not as terse as Lee Child, she laughs), she didn’t with Bleeding Kansas. “It’s the story of, an autobiography of a place the way people relate to each other”. But it wasn’t until she was able to add the war in Iraq, that all the pieces came together. She had the Wiccans in her old home, and she added a story about the Jewish “perfect red heifer” that had been on her mind for some time. It took her a while to decide on the different plots. Sara was busy writing Blacklist at the time, but couldn’t let the idea go. The women had moved, hoping for privacy, but “you’re never private in the country”. The idea for Bleeding Kansas came after Sara heard about the women who bought her childhood home in rural Kansas, and the problems these two women, practising Wiccans, encountered with the local sheriff’s deputy, who “harassed them in a terrifying way, and began doing really frightening things”. Though Sara calls it a “kind of thriller, not a crime novel”. On Radio Five earlier in the week the book was introduced as crime, and it does actually fit that label better than you’d think. This is a departure from her V I Warshawski crime novels, but once you start looking, there are more similarities between the two than you’d expect.

It’s the middle of Sara’s week long British tour to publicise her new novel, Bleeding Kansas. She drinks a smoothie which she dilutes with water as she talks. She’s amusing and confident, and for her talk in Manchester, the night before our interview, Sara is wearing what I call Katharine Hepburn trousers, a beautiful grey knitted top and a long pink scarf.

Maybe they do, or maybe Sara thinks of something nice to say about everyone she meets. Sara Paretsky is pleased to be back in Val McDermid country, and claims that Mancunians make the best audience.

She mentions something from her early, New York, childhood called the “good humour truck”, which I take to be a cousin of our ice cream vans. As Sara recounts a drinking story about Hammett and Faulkner, she says she can’t drink much herself, but can imagine herself in close contact with hot fudge sauce. Pre-interview information had led me to believe that Sara Paretsky lives off cappuccinos, which would fit the image of the beautifully slim and extremely well dressed Chicago author.

Bleeding Kansas by Sara Paretsky