Description

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, Marsh’s rogue and ambitious third wife, a relentless orthodox Mormon Apostle, a copper magnate with a fetish for polygamists, 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.

Praise for the author’s novels:

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

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

“A strange and beautiful magic trick of a book, and I was enthralled. I loved it.” – Edan Lepucki, author of Time’s Mouth and California