Some stories arrive dressed as mysteries but turn out to be something far richer, like meditations on grace, community, and the stubborn persistence of hope in the face of old wounds. Killing Spring by Anita Klumpers is that kind of story, but then, that’s just the way Anita’s talent manifests on a page. Set in the layered, history-soaked river town of Portia, over a few remarkable spring days in 2012, the book follows Claudia Alexander, the quietly brave, history-loving woman we first met in Winter Watch, but now navigating a recent engagement, a missing stranger, and a web of secrets that reach back decades. The narrative asks questions about prejudice, forgiveness, and what it means to be a hero with fatal flaws. Yet, Killing Spring never loses its warmth, humor, or faith. Today, we talk to author Anita Klumpers to find out about the novel, the characters who surprised her, the themes she couldn’t resist, and the small town that gave the story its soul.

PBG: We first met Claudia Alexander in your novel Winter Watch. Now she arrives in Portia as a newly engaged woman juggling bridal magazines with a thick historical novel her fiancé assigned to her. How did you continue to develop her as a character who carries both a whimsical sense of wonder about history and a quiet, lingering wound (her facial scar) that has divided her life into “pre-scar” and “post-scar” chapters? What did you want readers to feel as they watched her navigate Portia through that dual lens?

AK: First, Claudia would want readers to understand that her wounds—both the facial scar and the shame and isolation that followed, could have been so much worse. She had been blessed with what many in similar circumstances don’t have: a strong sense of identity. Pre-scar she had been pretty and bright and talented, but not exceptional. And her family made certain she understood that unexceptional was a wonderful way to be. After the accident that scarred her so conspicuously, her family were sympathetic but refused to pity her. She was still part of the family, part of the community, still a child of God.
By the time we meet her again in Killing Spring, she has managed to come out of her self-imposed shell. She’s learned not to cringe whenever someone notices her scar. She handles genuine interest or observations with grace and humor but doesn’t meekly tolerate cruelty. The events of Winter Watch have forced her to be more outward-looking, more conscious of the needs and weaknesses of others. Her natural kindness could wiggle past her shell. That, along with her honesty and unexpected courage, attracted the attention and love of Ezra Prosper. While she still deals with old gut-level reactions in new situations with new people, Claudia has come full circle to embracing her true identity as one who is greatly loved.

PBG: Lyle Hershey is introduced with the unforgettable image of “a beautiful man in the way old, well-made things are beautiful”. He’s a benevolent scholar with faded copper streaks in his white hair. He carries both grace and a deeply buried secret. What drew you to writing a character of such composed dignity who is also quietly haunted? How did you balance making him admirable without making him untouchable?

AK: Lyle is a thoroughly decent man whose charm isn’t skin deep or manipulative. He has a genuinely noble character with just enough imp to keep him from being stuffy. He loves his family and his community and is loyal to his friends and his values. But bad things happen to decent people. And decent people don’t always react in the wisest of ways. Lyle stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that a broken relationship can’t be fixed. Until he grasps that truth, relationships with those dearest to him will be crippled. But he is an old-school type of new-world nobility who always knows his duty and performs it with grace.

PBG: Claudia and Ezra’s relationship is refreshingly countercultural. They have chosen to wait for marriage in a way Claudia herself describes as “counter-cultural” rather than old-fashioned. Yet their intimacy is palpable from the first pages. How did you craft the tension and tenderness of a couple so newly engaged, and what did you hope to communicate to readers about the spiritual and relational richness of that kind of commitment?

AK: The answer is in your question! Claudia and Ezra do have a richly spiritual and relational type of commitment to each other. They’ve chosen to concentrate on that facet of intimacy now, during their engagement, so the physical intimacy of marriage will be sweeter and life-long. I chose not to focus too much on natural tensions and temptations of engaged couples, because my stories are not out-and-out romances. We don’t have full access to the decisions and strategies Claudia and Ezra use to remain countercultural.

PBG: Portia, Illinois, is a small river town layered with Civil War history, Moses Dickson’s legacy, limestone buildings, and hills that “loom like anxious parents.” How did you build this setting, and how intentional were you in using Portia’s history of both racial injustice and quiet heroism as a kind of moral landscape for the story?

AK: The setting was no problem to build! My husband and I visited Galena, Illinois in 2012. I fell in love with the town, the hills that need to be scaled to reach the next street and next set of delightful homes and shops and historical sites. With wild abandon, I added several square miles to the northwest corner of Illinois along the Mississippi to accommodate Portia.

I met my new historical crush there—statesman and abolitionist Elihu Washburne, and mention him in the book. Moses Dickson was a free-born abolitionist who worked on the Underground Railroad. Marcus Augustus Gather, fugitive slave, is a result of my imagination.
As a Midwessterner whose mom was born in Chicago, I’m proud of the region’s dedication to freedom and equality. But Galena/Portia and Illinois and the Midwest and the United States—none are homogenous. There are evil people, ignorant people, misguided people who judge by skin color. So Portia has its share of complexities and sordid stories. However, it’s a town that isn’t defined by its lowest common denominator, but by the ideals it holds dear.

PBG: Magenta “Madge” Hershey arrives sharp-edged, guarded, and wickedly witty, a girl who learned early that love can be weaponized. Yet even in the early chapters, she shows moments of startling vulnerability. What drew you to giving Claudia, a relative stranger, the role of being the person Madge slowly, reluctantly opens to? What does that dynamic say about the way grace and community can work on a wounded heart?

AK: Madge protects herself by coming out swinging. She’s caustic and scrappy and alarmingly honest—about almost everything. Claudia’s reaction to hurt had been to draw in on herself. But she knows a protective shell when she sees one. She has no desire to hammer at Madge’s, but she won’t allow the girl to push her away either. Claudia’s upbringing and her newly-energized sense of identity mean her ego isn’t particularly fragile. This makes her the right person in the right place at the right time to befriend a prickly Madge. When Jed comes alongside Claudia to support Madge (in spite of her vehement objections) the shell starts to soften, although the wicked wit remains!

PBG: Jed Flynn is a seminary student in pastoral training who is also endearingly clumsy, plays banjo beautifully, and sings “Down to the River to Pray” with a voice that has “a layer of gravel keeping it from being pretty.” Music feels spiritually charged throughout the book. How deliberately did you use music, and particularly that song, as a vehicle for conveying something that words in the story couldn’t quite reach?

AK: I think Jed is wonderful. Hopefully his musical talent is portrayed realistically, because my musical acumen is barely on the positive side of zero. But I hum and sing and whistle all the time because music is a gift to all humanity, not just the virtuoso. While “Down to the River to Pray’ was traditionally identified as a slave song, that is not necessarily why Jed sings it. It’s plaintive and lovely and touches a chord that resonates with longing. It reached Madge in a way a sermon wouldn’t.
Maybe there was also a subconscious link to the actual river mentioned often in the book (you might say the theme flows though it 🙂 as well as the very present shadow still cast by the ogre of slavery.

PBG: Heloise Dare is one of the most delightful supporting characters with her lavender hair, a love of intrigue, and a quiet, budding faith she admits is brand new. She tells Claudia, “I’ve never prayed all that much. Until the last few days. And I didn’t believe in angels until I met you.” What role did you want Heloise to play in the story’s spiritual arc, and how did you resist making her spiritual awakening feel contrived?

AK: Isn’t Heloise fabulous? She loves freely and lives large. The spiritual arc in Winter Watch and Killing Spring are less overt than in some of my other books. God-themes are portrayed more by manifestations of faith and grace and redemption than direct reference. In keeping with that approach, Heloise learns through a few life-altering events that there is a God. Someone who hears prayers and answers, and who often uses His children (like Claudia) to answer those prayers. Heloise just isn’t certain how to express this new faith in words.

PBG: Harvey Kaluza is introduced as a blustering, bigoted old man who also, we begin to sense, carries a hidden act of heroism in his past. He makes Claudia deeply uncomfortable and yet she can’t look away from him. How did you approach the challenge of creating a character who is genuinely difficult, prejudiced and prickly, while still asking readers to care about what happens to him?

AK:If we were only patient with patient people and kind to kind people and tolerant of tolerant people, our worlds would be small and insular and monochromatic. And humans are rarely one-dimensional. A ‘good’ facade can conceal a rotting soul. Bluster and bigotry are wrong, but aren’t the final authority on a person’s nature. Harvey is a man who knows hurt and loss. He absorbed ideas and biases without acquiring the tools to evaluate them. His rudeness and disquieting candor and vulnerability are all on display, and Claudia chooses to evaluate them all equally. In other words, she doesn’t let the offensive statements and crude observations override her recognition that he is bewildered by a world even more offensive and crude than he is. I hope readers care about Harvey!

PBG: The novel weaves together a mystery plot with a deeply moral historical thread; Miss Julia’s story of racial violence in the 1950s, Moses Dickson’s legacy, and Harvey’s buried past all converge in ways that feel urgent rather than didactic. How did you handle the responsibility of telling stories of racial injustice, and what did you want that history to say to contemporary readers?

AK: Oh boy. It felt a bit presumptuous, as a white woman who has lived a comparatively sheltered life, to write about the ordeals of a black woman in the 1950s. But I was raised by two parents who hated bigotry, In elementary school, when we form so many of our worldviews, I read books about Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver and Harriet Tubman. As a believer, I better hate bigotry and injustice. As a woman, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine Miss Julia’s fierce love for her family, and since she is a sister in Christ, it was vital that I saw her stand up to injustice but believe with all her heart in grace and redemption.
Like my fellow Christians, I long to see us displaying this type of grace and announcing redemption to a world that seems devoted to grudges and revenge and resentment.

PBG: The title Killing Spring feels layered. There is the literal unseasonably warm spring, and there is Lyle’s phrase “the lesser portion of spring,” a fragile seasonal appetizer before the real feast. Yet there are also things being killed: secrets, innocence, relationships, and possibly hope itself in some characters. How consciously did you use the season as a metaphor, and what did you want “killing spring” to ultimately mean by the time the reader finishes the story?

AK: My dad used to quote a T.S. Eliot poem that began;
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

The spring of 2012 in Portia is beautiful. But the budding trees and flower blossoms don’t arrive without a certain violence, wrenching open the earth with new shoots, bursting from quiet tree branches—the quiet grey of winter is ripped open by greening violence. Even the warm breezes are driven by competing air currents. And the new growth is always one killing frost away from destruction.

The opening lines of that Eliot poem (from The Waste Land, 1922) always bothered me because I think of spring as a lovely, gentle season. But it really isn’t. The description of the ‘cruellest month’ have stayed with me for decades and set up the contrast between the beautifully early spring of 2012 and the cruelty that exists alongside the loveliness.

You mention the death of relationships. Irrevocably, painfully dead. Secrets were exposed and killed. Blessedly, forever dead.
And the threatened killing frost that spring can bring doesn’t have the final word. Claudia is once again seeing grace and redemption and new life manifest in the lives of the people she is—despite herself—learning to love. A killing spring is a hard reality, but it can never fully destroy what is meant to be eternal.

Killing Spring

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