New Mormon (LDS) Mystery from Mette Ivie Harrison Tackles Immigration

[Originally published in the New York Journal of Books]

Reasons to read any mystery by Mette Ivie Harrison: (1) They’re set within the struggles of active Mormons in Utah (members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, an all-American historic treasure). (2) They face the grim reality of what death and other crimes do within a close community. (3) The protagonist, amateur sleuth and Mormon bishop’s wife Linda Wallheim, reveals her very vivid agony over the principles of her church, her faith, and her marriage, while drawn to rescuing victims of crime around her.

Not of This Fold is Harrison’s very to-the-moment probe of immigration issues and the treatment of darker skinned members within the church and its gospel, The Book of Mormon. Linda Wallheim tries to set a good example of how a person can question the church and its heritage, yet live within the bounds of faith in God. So at first she defends the gospel she lives with, but her difficult friend Gwen—a more outspoken and angry rebel than Linda—challenges such easy resolution:

“The idea that Latinos are the descendants of the Lamanites and that we as Mormons have a duty to bring the gospel to them, there’s an inherent superiority and colonialist attitude about it. I see it in the way that Greg Hope interacts with people every Sunday at church. He’s the white guy with the truth. They have to defer to him.”

Linda can’t deny the situation. And with Gwen, she’s quick to blame Greg Hope, who’s both a Mormon bishop (local congregation leader) and an employer of especially the Latinos in the region with uncertain immigration status. Of course, he’s assisting them in getting proper papers. Or is he?

When the Mexican mom of three small children is murdered, Linda and Gwen realize that their probing of the situation may have enflamed it further. Violating partnerships with their husbands, they struggle to investigate the roots of the crime, and of a local crime wave of breaking and entering that seems oddy parallel to Greg Hope’s security business among prosperous Mormons in the area.

As always, Harrison’s plotting is tight, her pacing compelling, and her attack on the morality of the Mormon Church sharp-clawed yet heartbreaking. As Linda continues to test the resilience of her marriage, her own faith, and her sense of responsibility to women in the area, questions and insights tumble and align. For readers of the Linda Wallheim Mystery Series, this is a must-read book.

On the other hand, those not already hooked by the characters and situation may struggle with Not of This Fold. Linda’s callous disregard of her husband’s concerns and her encouragement of risk for other women don’t make her very likeable. To the extent that a powerful mystery series shows hard-earned growth in the protagonist, Harrison is missing the magic ingredient this time around—Linda treats her husband poorly in many ways, similarly to what she did in the 2017 title in the series, For Time and All Eternities. When her husband Kurt finally demands that she drop her investigation, he says she’s got to listen to him this time:

’And if I don’t?’ I asked stubbornly. …

‘If you don’t, well …’ There was only a moment’s hesitation before he said, ‘I’m going to have to call both you and Gwen in for a disciplinary counsel.’

It wasn’t at all what I’d expected, and it made me wonder what was going on in his head. I wished I could be more sympathetic to him, but he was using his position bullying me, and I wasn’t about to put up with that.

Linda’s attitude toward Kurt eventually robs her of the chance to feel she’s solved the case and rescued someone, which also deprives the book of the satisfaction that a well-solved mystery usually conveys. Add this book to any shelf of Mormon mysteries, Utah settings, or women sleuths—but for maximum pleasure, read Harrison’s early titles first, to catch on to what she’s working to convey.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Third Linda Wallheim Crime Novel, FOR TIME AND ALL ETERNITIES, from Mette Ivie Harrison

There's a marvelous uncertainty about jumping into a crime fiction series as a reader, not starting with the first book. Will the experience be more powerful because the author has grown in the process of writing earlier books in the series? Or lack resonance because you as the reader don't really know what's developed in the protagonist's life before this book? Or will it be sort of neutral -- because the author is skillful enough to paint the important details of the past without being long-winded, so it doesn't matter whether you've read the earlier books or not?

An example of a series where it's important to read in sequence is David Downing's John Russell espionage series, set in Berlin, Germany, during the Second World War. Russell and his lover Effi Koenen, an actress uneasily performing for the German High Command as John forcibly serves British, American, Russian, and German needs, grow and change in their priorities and goals across the series (and across the war). Start with Zoo Station and savor the author's process, the characters' journeys, and the plots that stand alone in each book, yet dovetail smoothly into the war's history.

A parallel crime fiction series with a very different feel is another Second World War series, the Billy Boyle investigations, written by James Benn. Boyle, new generation in a family of Boston cops, works secretly for General Eisenhower as a detective, and although subsequent books sketch in deftly some of the adventures Boyle and his friends experienced in the earlier ones, his development is the kind you'd expect for a police detective growing more skillful and more dedicated over the years -- it's enjoyable to enter the series at any book, and even to skip around among them. Benn frames each as its own special world of risk and intrigue.

Where in this set of considerations should we place the books by Mette Ivie Harrison? Her third in her Linda Wallheim series, like the other  two (The Bishop's Wife, His Right Hand) exposes the protagonist to a disturbed family situation that she feels obligated to address -- because she is the wife of a leader in the family's religious community, the Mormons (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, aka LDS). FOR TIME AND ALL ETERNITIES sees Linda Wallheim grapple with another of the reasons that she finds her church difficult: its history of plural marriage and the fragments of existing cults that still cling to that tradition. Wallheim's earlier "amateur sleuth" investigations have involved the duty of spouses to each other, and the acceptance (or rejection) of same-sex love when family members reveal they no longer fit the church's doctrines.

In a sense, Harrison's series resembles Benn's -- the protagonist does not rely on her emotional or mindful learning from earlier books as she goes along, and Harrison's adept portrayal of the church she herself loves supports each book's plot well. When friction arises at the start of this third book, Wallheim is horrified by what she hears from her son Kenneth as he reveals details about a new girlfriend:

There was a long pause and I realized we weren't done with the difficult part of the conversation. "We met at a former Mormons group. We call it Mormons Anonymous."

Mormons Anonymous -- like Alcoholics Anonymous or Gamblers Anonymous? As if my religion were some kind of addictive behavior that you had to recover from?

Harrison has been open in sharing some of her own struggles with that church. Having experienced a profound loss of faith and then a restoration of it, she is a member in good standing in the LDS. Her website admits that her first crime novel was part of her struggle with how to face the conflicts in the group. She is careful to note the differences between her own faith journey and Linda Wallheim's; still, she is clearly still tugging at the most painful issues of the mainstream LDS structure, and showing some of the issues through her fiction.

Wallheim stumbles, through wanting to help her son, into a group that's living with plural marriage -- the usual form, multiple wives (and children) to one powerful husband. She's soon aware of dysfunctional undercurrents in the situation, and overdoes her involvement.

When the plot blossoms into a death, possibly a murder, Wallheim makes an enormous error of judgment (and making an error of judgment is of course classic in an amateur sleuth plot): She goes along with not calling in the police.

And here, as a mystery reader, I found myself in deep disagreement -- I could not "buy" that this experienced wife of a dedicated church leader would jeopardize her marriage and commit a crime herself (helping to cover up the death) for the sake of holding this terrible family together.

My flaw? Or the book's? I'd love to hear from other readers on this issue.

However, my reaction changes how I feel about the series: If you are new to it, start with the first two books, please! You'll have a good chance of bonding to this smart, questioning, impromptu investigator and grasping the love and (overblown?) sense of responsibility that drive her into the sleuth role. And in that case, you'll definitely want to have book 3, FOR TIME AND ALL ETERNITIES, to fit into the arc of narrative and the important changes to Wallheim's own family.

I'd suggest not jumping into book 3 without the others ... I think it won't stand well on its own, but may well be critical to read before we all have the chance to savor Harrison's fourth book in the series (which is doubtless mostly written at this point). Like Louise Penny's books, there's clearly an overall progress through the series -- and I want to enjoy every bit of it. From Soho Crime, another must-read series.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Trust Your Neighbor? Not in Mette Ivie Harrison's Second Mormon Mystery, HIS RIGHT HAND

Mette Ivie Harrison's second crime novel, with its December 1 release, is a terrific addition to the winter reading list. It's an excellent gift for most mystery readers (the only exceptions would be devoted cozy fans who don't read other forms) -- and an even better gift to oneself, for a powerful journey into a little-understood but all-American culture: that of a middle-class community of Mormons, in today's Utah.

Like Linda Castillo's framing of Amish culture, or Donna Leon's of Venetian, Harrison portrays the gentle force of isolation that can arrive with a community where belief or geography draws a line of defense -- "people who live here" know each other, and know the rules of interaction, in a way that outsiders can't.

In the opening of HIS RIGHT HAND, the second Linda Wallheim mystery, Linda's quickly aware of unusual frictions around her. The scene is a three-couple evening out, the "annual bishopric dinner" where her husband Kurt, the bishop, is host to his closest assistants Tom and Carl, and all three wives. A Mormon bishop is not at all similar to a Catholic one -- the task is a lay leadership one, heavy with prayer and study, yes, but very much "one of the people" agreeing to manage the local community, known as the ward. It's all a volunteer effort, laid on top of working full-time jobs. So for Kurt, Tom and Carl are essential: "Without them, the job of bishop would have overwhelmed Kurt. They were his right hand in more than one way," Linda reflects.

But Carl and his wife Emma don't show up as planned, Carl's not answering Kurt's phone calls, and when Linda places her own call to Emma instead, the background conversation reveals fractures in Carl and Emma's marriage that make Linda suspect the relationship is in deep trouble, and possibly abusive.

A bishop's wife, in Harrison's world, gets as heavy an assignment as her husband but with no formal standing: Her husband relies on her to let him know when pastoral care is needed by women and children in the community, and to do her best to smooth over the normal life frictions around her. (And that's on top of being a somewhat "dated" version of a wife, plus mom.) Linda's ready to pry a bit into the lives of this couple who live near her. And when Carl and Emma finally arrive at the restaurant, she's on Emma's side in what might be an uneven situation where the men aren't respecting the women -- at least, as Linda sees things:

I wasn't going to let Carl off so easily. "We're all God's children, here to do His work to serve each other," I said to him. "The form that service takes surely matters less than the fact that we have a joint purpose." I watched Emma nod once and set her hands on the table, folded.

But Carl didn't let it go. "We may have a joint purpose, but our roles are entirely different. Women have one path to follow and men have another. We can only find true perfection in fulfilling our roles completely, and accepting that God is the one who chooses who is to have one role and who is to have the other."

When Emma opts to head home, away from this pontificating, Carl hurries out to join her. And that's the last Emma sees of him -- his death soon after leaves her drenched in guilt for her suspicions about him, her own harsher-than-usual words, and the possibility that she's overlooked what's going on in her neighbors' lives, when she's supposed to be paying attention and helping her husband know where to add extra caring and support.

Harrison's explanations of Mormon (Church of Latter-Day Saints) life can sometimes come across as a bit stiff and lesson-like. But her characters, especially Linda and Kurt, are rich and well rounded, and Linda's mix of guilt and curiosity, and soon her determination to fix things, are easy to believe and to empathize with. So are Linda's regular lapses from the submissive role she knows she "ought" to take with Kurt as she probes the situation and the people around her who may have had motives to
murder Carl.

A second powerful plot line is the fracturing taking place in Linda's own family, where one of her grown sons announces his identity and life choices in ways that make her unsure whether she'll be able to hold her family together. Soon the issues in her home prove to be a rippled echo of the ones stressing the community at large -- including, oddly enough, Carl and Emma's family, too.

Harrison's pacing is strong, and her portrayals of stress and mental illness ring valid, no matter what community or religion is involved. For many readers, this will be a first look inside Mormon family life, and Harrison is clear and proud as she opens the doors and windows for newcomers.

If there's a flaw here, it's in Linda's impulsiveness, which at times goes well beyond curiosity and the urge to make amends, into meddling and deliberately ignoring her husband's more tempered pace. I found the same uneasiness with her choices in Harrison's first book, The Bishop's Wife -- but let's face it, the poor choices of amateur sleuths are building blocks of this genre! Here, it wasn't enough to spoil the pleasure of this well-spun mystery and Linda's struggles with her beliefs about God and the faith she upholds. A really good read, and I strongly recommend this book! Yes, you'll get more out of HIS RIGHT HAND if you read The Bishop's Wife first -- but Harrison's explanations fill in the details quickly, and reading the pair in inverse order will be just about as good.

From Soho Crime, again -- a great choice for bookshelves that feature strong mysteries with unforgettable settings and all-too-human motives.

Exciting Debut Mystery, Mormon (LDS): THE BISHOP'S WIFE, Mette Ivie Harrison

Mette Ivie Harrison is no newcomer as an author -- her children's books have charmed readers and garnered warm reviews over the years, and in 2013 her memoir of being both a dedicated mom and a nationally ranked triathlete, Ironmom, was her entry into the "books for adults" world.

But in THE BISHOP'S WIFE, she provides a well-told and suspenseful murder mystery, in traditional form with amateur sleuth, that's both a page-turner and far more revealing than most nonfiction can be.

In some places, like Utah and some of Illinois, being a member of the Mormon Church -- also known as LDS, for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints -- is as common as being, say, a Protestant or Catholic is in northern New England or the MidAtlantic states. And it is the quintessential American faith, born here with Joseph Smith (in Vermont!) and forged in a fiercely difficult cross-country trek of pioneers looking for a land to nurture, where they could also nurture their religion.

Yet the historic Mormon tie to polygamy makes even the modern version of the religion vulnerable to casual attacks, and there are many other ways in which its differences -- temples, "sealing" family members to each other, the missionary years that many of its teens tackle -- stand out. Even the title Harrison chose for this work of suspense refers to something that's more Mormon (her choice of term; here in Vermont I'd use "LDS" but she explains her choice on her website) and less understood. So here is the book's first paragraph, which tackles both that difference and a familiarity that anyone who's been a deacon, a community leader, even a den mother, troop leader, or class dad or mom, can relate to:

Mormon bishop's wife isn't an official calling. "Bishop's wife" isn't a position listed on ward documents; there's no ceremonial laying-on of hands or pronounced blessings from on high. But if the bishop is the father of the ward, the bishop's wife is the mother, and that meant there were five hundred people who were under my care. I was used to the phone calls in the middle of the night, to the doorbell ringing far too late and far too early. I was used to being looked past, because I was never the person that they were there to see.

That's Linda Wallheim, and look how much you already know about her -- importantly, for a mystery, you can see that she feels responsible for the care of others, and also that she's used to fading back out of the center of things, letting someone else be "the person they were there to see." Those are two admirable characteristics for someone who'll decide to dig into a crime and stick with the investigation.

On this particular morning, at six-thirty (groan), the doorbell's pressed by Jared Helm, one of the newer members of the ward (the church fellowship), carrying his adorable five-year-old daughter.  And it's soon clear that the mom in the family is missing.

Linda's investigation is at first mostly secondhand -- the bits that her husband can reveal without breaking a confidence, the smaller bits that a five-year-old conveys in both words and reactions, and conversations with others.

But Linda has a pressing reason, beyond her usual sense of responsibility, to bond with the little girl in this damaged family: She's suffered the loss of her own daughter, stillborn, and although she has sons and a really good husband, she's wounded in ways she can barely describe -- and it's hurting her own marriage, whether she sees it or not.

So her hunt for the truth of what's happened around her is more than an effort to supplement her husband's role as bishop, more than a dare to herself to face the truth of some of the more manipulative men in her social group. It's her struggle to find a way to carry her loss.

Along the way, Harrison opens up some of the traditions, rules, and controversies with her church. (She is in face a member, after her own spiritual crisis, which she's still walking through. Yes, the loss of a daughter. Can God be good, when such terrible things happen?) Some, I already knew about from attending services and visiting in the homes of Mormon friends, years ago -- like Fast Sunday, a tradition of going without food in order to reflect on the experience and give the money saved to those who need it. And bearing testimony, something that also happens in many an evangelical Protestant congregation -- but in THE BISHOP'S WIFE also includes "small children whose 'testimonies' are whispered into their ears by older children. I disapprove of this practice." And bang, that quickly, we're in Linda's uncomfortable shoes: being smart, educated, committed to her church, and questioning it.

This is where, in some ways, the revelations of the book could have been easier for its author if done as nonfiction (which in some ways they have been, both on her website and in Ironmom). It's far too easy for readers to assume that the author "matches" the protagonist. I was aware of pulling away from the story at moments like this, questioning how close that identification really was -- and in some ways that's not so great for staying in the story, feeling the suspense build.

So it's a measure of how well-chosen Harrison's plot twists are, that in spite of those moments of pulling back, I kept reading, reading, reading -- deep into the night, in fact. As Linda discovers her own naive misconception of some of the marriages around her, and the limits of what her role allows her, she takes risks that graduate from emotional and marital to being threatened physically.

The writer of any "amateur sleuth" mystery needs to convince us that we too, in that person's shoes, would take risks and face danger. Harrison succeeds completely, so that Linda's reasoning makes sense, her actions become necessary, and the escalating situation resonates:

"I could come in and help you clean up, If you'd like," I offered. What was I doing? Going into a house alone with a man who might have killed his wife[,] to try to find evidence against him? But I had been drawn into this and I was going to use all the skills I had to resolve it.

Also at stake here, and deftly probed, is Linda's willingness to accept the form of marriage she's agreed to: one where her husband is expected to set limits on her actions, and where her sons question her choices, as well as the religion in which they were raised.

There's a lot going on here, and I was glad to notice that although the criminal investigation wraps up snugly at the end (terrific twists, I have to say!), many of the unraveled parts of Linda Wallheim's life remain to be worked with. It's clear this is the start of a series; I'm looking forward to more.

Grab this book right away if you are fascinated with interior Mormon life; if you're curious about how family and faith traditions come together and want the emotional insight that a work of fiction can allow; if you're brave enough to look at domestic abuse in both a mystery and the culture around us; and if you like well-twisted strands of investigation and discovery. Sure, there are a few patches of Linda's internal dialogue that run long and sometimes slow the pace -- but overall, I felt the balance was worth it. This is an impressive debut mystery for Harrison, and a great finale to the year of strong, diverse mysteries from Soho Crime.

Three cheers for the 2014 crime fiction -- and here's to the adventures of 2015 ahead!

Coming Soon: Strong Debut (and Mormon/LDS) Mystery from Mette Ivie Harrison

Just want to let you know -- the release date for THE BISHOP'S WIFE, a crime fiction debut that I'm recommending VERY highly, is December 30. Because we try to wait until very close to the date when a book is available before we review it here, I'm holding off until after Dec. 25. But it's hard to wait! This is a winner ...