The Righteous by Michael Wallace

I know that Amazon uses their Kindle specials to push new and/or unknown writers - and generally I don't mind. I'm not sure I mind this time. I think it is more a case this time that this trilogy isn't really my sort of thing - right now I'm not sure if I want to read the other two.

I suppose that fundamentally they are thrillers not mysteries - and pretty brutal in spots - like the scene in the first few pages where the bads rip the first victim's tongue out before they cut her throat. The remainder of the murders are gruesome as well - and those that happen "off stage" are described in great detail.

The setting is among the outlawed polygamist Mormon groups scattered around Utah and other areas with more land than population. It is interesting in that it takes on one of the most fundamental problems with a social order arranged around polygamy - what about the extra young men? As I understand it, the original vision or whatever making polygamy the order of the church arose from the charisma of the leader, Brigham Young, who attracted many more women followers than men. Since they had already adopted a fixed patriarchal order wherein women could only be admitted to heaven if they were married, it followed that the faithful must take up the slack by marrying all those extra women. However, as procreation followed its natural course, the numbers evened out - and now they had a surplus of young men. In many such societies, that problem is handled by war and other things frequently fatal to young men, but the Mormon church did not have recourse to a handy little war. I suspect that when the government came after them to give up the practice, most thinking members of their leadership were thinking, "What took them so long?"

According to this writer, what happened to those loosely connected communities which refused to give up the practice was that they simply kicked out the surplus boys. As told in this story, they would select the "likeliest" - the brightest, the best looking, the most athletic - and put the others out on the road. He compares it to a pride of lions and the roving bands of bachelors.

Throw into the mix a couple a rather nasty eugenics programs and a little tax fraud, a few drug induced visions, and some really warped conditioning - and there you have it.

I may come back to Book 2 - in spite of it all, he produced a couple of rather appealing characters - but not just yet. I think I need to read another cozy cookbook mystery - or a dozen - first.