After close to a decade of armed war between pro-slavery and free-state forces, Kansas joined the Union as a Free State on January 29, 1861. This led an enraged South to fire on Ft. Sumter and secede from the Union three months later. My family moved to Lawrence, Kansas in 1951, when I was four. Our first few nights in town were spent at the Eldridge Hotel, which had been the headquarters for the anti-slavery leadership – it was twice burned to the ground by so-called border ruffians. I grew up on the legends of the free state. In 1954, for the centennial of the founding of Lawrence, we acted out the bravery of the  free-state women. They sewed bullets into their crinolines to smuggle ammunition past the slavers, and they held onto homesteads in the face of arson and horrific assaults at the hands of slavers. That history has always haunted me. I’ve continued to read about it, and write about it, through a number of short stories and in three previous novels. Pay Dirt brings VI Warshawski to my hometown, far outside her comfort zone, although the crimes she faces are all too familiar to her. As I…