Bleeding Kansas

I've enjoyed Paretsky's earlier work, including Ghost Country, her earlier non-Warshawski novel. But, alas, I found Bleeding Kansas to be almost unreadable. The characters are not fleshed out, the dialogue is wooden and cliched, and the representations of both orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Christians are so one-dimensional that they don't work even as critiques of those worldviews. It's clear that Paretsky had ideas she wished to share -- about hypocrisy, religion, family, and the importance of personal freedom. It's too bad she didn't craft a novel worthy of those themes and her own writing skills.