The title of Suzy Vitello’s novel refers to the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho.

It’s no secret that significant political, social and economic differences exist between folks living east and west of the Cascade Mountains.

This has prompted some to push for redrawing state boundaries and expanding Idaho to encompass the more conservative parts of what is now Washington and Oregon.

Not everyone is enamored of the idea, however. Portland author Suzy Vitello considers some of the troubling ramifications but tells it slant in her new novel, “Bitterroot.”

The title is a play on words in several different ways, but at face value, it refers to the setting of this story in Idaho’s Bitterroot Mountains.

Hazel Mackenzie is a bit of an odd duck in Steeplejack, the mining community she grew up in. Half-Japanese, an atheist and a professional artist who is “trained in corporeal revelations,” she specializes in the grisly practice of forensic art for the local police department.

This week’s book

“Bitterroot” by Suzy Vitello

Sibylline Press — 292 pp — $18

When she married Ethan Mackenzie, her high school sweetheart who returned to town after college armed with a law degree, she gained a modicum of respectability. But they had only begun to talk about building a house and having a baby when Ethan was killed in a car crash.

Now Hazel has built their dream house on her own, with money from the insurance settlement.

And it turns out that her twin brother Kento, who came out of the closet after moving to Seattle, is planning to start a family with his husband. They’ve asked Kento’s high school girlfriend, Corinda, to be the surrogate.

Corinda has always carried a torch for Kento, but after he moved away, she settled for marrying a widower who had five kids by his first wife. When that relationship became abusive, she left — so she is relieved to be making some good cash with this surrogacy and Hazel suspects Corinda probably harbors hopes that Kento will abandon his husband for her.

But when he comes back into town to check in on Corinda, he is shot and seriously wounded — apparently by a member of the local anti-LGBTQ movement.

And if all of the above doesn’t sound complicated enough, Vitello has more in store for you. Additional plot twists involve more hate crimes, the civil rights differences between the states of Washington and Idaho, kidnapping, betrayal and subterfuge practiced by close family members, and layers of intergenerational trauma. Talk about bitter roots.

Told in the first person from Hazel’s unvarnished point of view, this story sometimes forsakes complexity for simple harsh judgmentalism.

Another draft might have done more to smooth out the snarls in character motivation, but it seems like the author may have bitten off more than this particular plotline can chew.

It should be noted, however, that Vitello has a knack for writing descriptive passages. Consider the obstetrics waiting room filled with women in their third trimester, “their enormous bellies summiting out winter coats” — or once-glorious sunflowers that, by September, “were hunched as if infected with osteoporosis.”

“Bitterroot” probes society’s ills, but offers no easy cure.