The Mormon Church is experiencing a demographic crisis in this second book featuring Detective Abish Taylor of the Pleasant View, Utah Police Department. Disillusioned young men are abandoning the Church and leaving young Mormon women unable to fulfill their sacred obligation to marry and bear children to strengthen the Church for the final Battle. The Apostles, twelve men who advise the Prophet and form the governing Council of the Church, disagree on how to fix this problem. Some urge a return to the polygamy once practiced in the Church's early years, despite laws and public opprobrium that brought the Church into disrepute then.
Detective Abish “Abbie” Taylor, a lapsed member of the Church, returned home after the premature death of her husband, hoping for a quiet life and a chance to start over. Instead she finds herself drawn into a clash of wills with the secretive, male hierarchy that dominates the Church and demands absolute, unthinking obedience from church members. One night she is called out to the scene of a fatal car accident, where she discovers the victim is one of the Apostles and an old friend of her father's --- Heber Bentsen.
Abbie is skeptical at first when her father, a respected LDS historian, mentions that Bentsen was recently inquiring about the whereabouts of a number of young women who abruptly dropped out of their graduate studies program to undertake special "missions" for the Church. Following a hunch, she tracks the women and finds they have all recently crossed into Mexico not far from an old established LDS colony. Abbie takes a few days off from her job and heads to the Colonia Juárez, where she uncovers a plan to “seal” young women to church leaders in temple ceremonies. The children born of these "marriages" are then adopted by Mormon families in the United States.
Now Abbie possesses dangerous knowledge that poses a challenge to these men and their plans, and soon the threats begin. Abbie realizes her investigation could cost her father his job and his good standing in the Church. It could cost her her own job. It could even cost her her life.
This book is better written than Bentley's debut novel, Blessed Be the Wicked. It makes for a more compelling read. A significant amount of the plot however, still turns on Bentley's allegations about the beliefs and credulity of ordinary Mormons and accusations about the Church's leadership. It's not the first time that a religious sect has been portrayed in lurid colors and won't be the last.
Click HERE to read the * review in Publishers Weekly.
Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.
Click HERE to read the review and author profile from MysterySuspenseReviews.com
No comments:
Post a Comment