Description

Sometimes things are not as they appear, especially when religion, magic and shady dealings mix.

It’s 1908, and itinerant spirit medium Madame Ilsa von Hoffmann is at the end of her professional rope, facing down two unappealing options: join an ill-conceived commune founded by some fellow trans ex-vaudevillians, or take on a high-paying but mysterious job offered by a religious extremist in Salt Lake City. Madame Ilsa opts for Utah and the employ of one Roger Marsh who, it turns out, wants her to summon the ghost of Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s founder, to give his blessing to Marsh’s fledgling offshoot of the mainstream church.

Unsure how she’ll pull off this near-impossible task, Ilsa finds an ally in Francie Bream, an East Coast journalist in town to profile Mormon women at the dawn of the twentieth century. Bream’s motives remain obscure to Ilsa, though she begins to suspect the journalist has an agenda far more sinister than she could have imagined. Complicating the situation further are an inept and volatile henchman, a relentlessly orthodox Mormon apostle, a copper magnate with a fetish for polygamists, Marsh’s rogue third wife, and a vengeful private investigator from Ilsa’s past. As dead bodies accumulate around her, Madame Ilsa worries less and less about saving her career, and more about making it out of Salt Lake City alive.

“T.I.M. Wirkus’s A Bad Deal in Mormon Land is a fun and frenetic noir that keeps you guessing til the last page. You never know who’s playing who in this twisty tale of double dealing, double crosses, and double marriages! What dark deeds are happening in this pioneering work of Utah gothic? You won’t believe them til you read them!” —Bitter Karella, author of Moonflow and Quaint Folk

“Wirkus has delivered another delicious, fun, eminently readable yet intricate puzzle of a book. Perhaps even more than in their previous novels, A Bad Deal in Mormon Land reads like an externalized version of what must be the very, very, twisty, funny, surprising convolutions of the author’s own brain. Think about it: a great brain has just given us a great, generous, brain-like book. What a gift!” —Ryan McIlvain, author of Elders 

Praise for the author:

“One of the most exciting novelists of [their] generation.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Entertaining, fun and very, very smart.”– Percival Everett, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of James