About this item
In the follow-up to the controversial and critically acclaimed mystery The Bishop's Wife, Mormon housewife Linda Wallheim finds herself ruffling feathers in Draper, Utah, as she assists a murder investigation that is being derailed by transphobia within the LDS community.In Draper, Utah, a tight-knit Mormon community is thrown into upheaval when their ward's second counselor - one of the bishop's right-hand men - is found dead in an elaborately staged murder on church property. Carl Ashby was known as a devout Mormon, a pillar of the community, and a loving husband and father. Who would want him dead?Linda Wallheim, the wife of the ward's bishop, can't rest as long as the ward is suffering. She is particularly worried about Carl's grieving family. But the entire case is turned upside down by the autopsy report, which reveals Carl Ashby was a biological female. In the Mormon church, where gender is considered part of a person's soul, some people regard transgenderism as one of the worst possible transgressions of faith. Church officials seem to be more upset by Carl's gender than by his murder, and more concerned with hushing up the story than solving the crime.Linda realizes that if the police are to catch the killer, they are going to need an ally on the inside - and she is the only one who can help. Carl was living a life of secrecy for twenty years. What else was he hiding - and can Linda ferret out the key to his death before the rumors tear her community apart?
About the Author
Mette Ivie Harrison grew up in a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in central New Jersey in a family with eleven children, a dog, a pony, and lots of chickens. She moved to the more suburban Utah city of Provo at age ten, where her father taught Computer Science at Brigham Young University.In 1985, when she was in high school, she spent a year abroad at a German Gymnasium. She took numerous AP classes when she returned to Utah, and in 1988, was named one of twelve female "Ezra Taft Benson Scholars," the highest award offered by the Mormon-owned Brigham Young University, given not only for academic scholarship, but for service and dedication to the Mormon church. Because of AP credit, German language experience, and her tendency to take heavy credit loads, Mette was able to graduate from Brigham Young University with a Master's Degree in German Literature only two years later, in 1990, when she was nineteen. During her two years, Mette was a writer and editor for The Student Review, the subversive student newspaper not approved by the university. She also had experiences with several of the "September Six," the notorious feminist scholars who were excommunicated in 1992.Mette married high school sweetheart Matthew Harrison in December of 1990, following his mission for the Mormon church to Haiti. She went on to earn a PhD from Princeton University in 1995 in Germanic Languages and Literatures with a dissertation on the female Bildungsroman of the 18th century. She faced considerable difficulty on the topic because of prejudice against a dissertation that focused completely on women writers in a department without a single female tenured faculty member.Beginning in 1994, Mette worked as an adjunct professor at BYU, but decided in 1997 to work on her fiction writing career. Two years later, in 1999, she sold her first young adult novel, The Monster in Me, about a young teen girl who is fostered by a Mormon family in Heber, Utah. Mette has since published seven young adult novels, including Mira, Mirror and The Princess and the Hound. She has also published Ironmom, a memoir about the loss of her sixth child in 2005, and the subsequent training for an Ironman competition, which brought her some semblance of sanity after years of depression.Since 2006, Mette has completed four full Ironman competitions, more than one hundred total races, and is ranked #144 for her age group nationally in triathlon. She also trains her husband, Matt, and her children. All but the youngest have competed in at least half-marathon distance races, swim well, and volunteer at local races. Two have completed marathons, two have completed Olympic distance triathlons, and one just finished his first half Ironman (beating his father for the first time) in training for his first full Ironman. Mette trains an average of three hours a day and her PR for a half-Ironman (1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, 13.1 mile run) is now at 5:16.Mette delivered three of her f
