A Killing in Zion

Starred review from July 20, 2015
Hunt’s excellent second mystery featuring Art Oveson lives up to the promise of his Hillerman Prize–winning debut, City of Saints (2012). In 1934, Oveson is promoted to head the Anti-Polygamy Squad, a high-profile police unit that works to demonstrate to the world that the Mormons of Salt Lake City have left polygamy in their distant past. Art has been fruitlessly tailing the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Saints, LeGrand Johnston, until one day Art hears shots fired outside the polygamist’s temple and finds both Johnston and his bodyguard murdered. The polygamists are a tight-knit and uncooperative group, but Art discovers hints in the ensuing investigation that the illegal multiple marriages are the least of their crimes. The team learns of child brides, land swindles, and bodies in the desert outside of the town that the fundamentalist Mormons own in southern Utah. Hunt builds the action at a satisfying pace with surprising twists and revelations throughout. Readers will cheer a hero who is not only a fine policeman but also a family man with a strong moral compass. Agent: Steve Ross, Abrams Artists Agency.

August 1, 2015
This is set in the 1930s, but the plot feels modern: a schismatic Mormon sect is illegally practicing polygamy. When Salt Lake County officer Art Oveson, an ordinary and decent guy, has a bad day, he goes home and eats a bowl of ice cream with his pregnant wife. When a young woman is about to be sent to a state shelter, he puts her up in a spare room. He's appalled that his careerist bosses lack an abiding commitment to doing right. Maybe that's why, when he's suddenly taken off the case, he goes rogue and ignores the warning, Don't let the polygamists become your white whale. There's a delightfully evil influence: Oveson's aide, Roscoe, a sly reference to the Black Mask private eyes emerging in 1930s pulp fiction. Roscoeeven his name is a clueis a boozy brawler with a foul mouth and his own code of cop honor. For good or ill, he steals the show, and it's him, not the ice-cream-eating hero, we're most anxious to see again in a sequel. There's a quirkiness here that just could make an entertainingly offbeat historical series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)