Moroni Traveler

Moroni Traveler finds it a blessing and a curse to be named for the angel that graces the top of the temple looming over Brigham Young's city. The ex-football star-turned-private detective has returned to Salt Lake City, a town he once called home. During a spring blizzard, Moroni meets Penny Varney, the ungodly daughter of a powerful high churchman. She retains him to find her mother-whom she fears is dead. His boyhood friend, Willis Tanner, also solicits his services on the same day. Moroni can't believe his luck, but there's a catch: Willis is acting for the church and wants Moroni to keep an eye on Penny. Moroni is soon on the trail of a far-out religious sect whose self-appointed savior calls for sanctified murder. Moroni must act fast to close the case and discover the truth. The next victim could be him.

Salt Lake City is hotter than hell. The Church of the Latter-day Saints is about to celebrate Pioneer Day, in honor of the Saints who crossed half a continent searching for a home. And in the sun-scorched streets, PI Moroni Traveler, fallen Saint and former football star, is searching for a vicious serial killer. The murderer's calling card is a videotape of his beautiful victims-beautiful before the self-styled "Jack the Ripper" vents his savage, woman-hating rage. The next target is Claire Bennion, the ex-girlfriend Traveler can't manage to forget. The Church wants the killer stopped, no questions asked. But Traveler has his own reasons for facing down a weird mountain cult, Zion's powerful elite, and a murderer bent on paying for his own sins in innocent blood.

Ace shortstop Pepper Dalton has finally learned to hit-or so it seems to the good people of Salt Lake City. Moroni Traveler, a private eye named for an angel and cut from the same cloth as his hell-bent father, is hired to prove that Pepper did not kill his sister with a baseball bat. A boyhood hero of Moroni's, Pepper is living, potbellied proof that the past, like everything else, just ain't what it used to be. While the Mormons use computers and private security men to keep tabs in their town, and Moroni's former girlfriend pulls a paternity suit on Moroni's father, the case of the ex-shortstop and his murdered sister is growing more sinister all the time. With a religious fanatic, a slick church lawyer, and an old ballplayer's lifelong dream involved, Moroni knows this is a story about how the road to glory is paved with blood.

The isolated town of Wasatch sits in Mormon country-a hard place where right and wrong are as clear as night and day. But smoke from nearby mountain wildfires swirls menacingly through the streets, as unsettling as the dark secrets so zealously guarded by Brigham Young's faithful. Moroni Traveler, a PI named for an angel, is an outsider-an unwanted unbeliever determined to discover the truth about a dead woman. Branded a devil and greeted with violence, Moroni launches into an investigation that leads him into a smoldering thicket of rumor and concealment. Two people have already been killed. When the case turns brutally personal, there's no going back, and Moroni will journey through hell to ensure that vengeance will be his.

"How many times have I told you? Never get involved with the church hierarchy." Words of wisdom, surely, but Moroni Traveler can't seem to take his father's advice. Salt Lake City private investigators, Moroni and his father, Martin, maintain an uneasy truce with the Church of Latter-day Saints. But Moroni owes a debt to his boyhood friend Willis Tanner, now one of the top-ranking officials in the LDS, and Willis has come to collect. Lael Woolley, grandniece of the First Prophet, the head of the Mormon church on earth, has been kidnapped, and the prophet believes only Traveler, a gentile, can rescue her. Moroni agrees, although reluctantly-in Salt Lake City you just don't say no to the LDS. He and his father set out to find Lael with carte blanche from the prophet and the assistance of three enterprising, offbeat drifters who live in the lobby of the Travelers' office building. Their search takes them around the state and into the church's extensive genealogical records, pointing to a subversive Mormon feminist group that may or may not be responsible for Lael's disappearance.

Major Lewis Stiles is dying of cancer, but he wants all his affairs in order before he is "called home." To that end he wants to hire Moroni Traveler and his father, Martin, to track down one of the prisoners he was responsible for during World War II. Unseen since his mysterious disappearance from the POW camp at Cowdery Junction, Utah, Karl Falke is still owed $132.07 in back pay, and Stiles wants Falke to receive his due. Knowing the chances of success are slim to none, Moroni is reluctant, but ever a soft touch for lost causes he takes the case. The search seems innocent enough, but as with any investigation in the promised land, the Travelers soon run up against the Latter-day Saints. Moroni's childhood friend Willis Tanner, now a high-level bureaucrat in the church, continues to poke his nose into Traveler business, this time with the added incentive of keeping the prophet's niece Lael Woolley out of trouble. While grappling with issues of family and responsibility, Moroni realizes that the answers to riddles from the past are to be found in the small towns and silent graveyards of Utah.

Moroni Traveler, the Salt Lake City investigator heralded by the New York Times Book Review as "a true rebel hero in the classic private-eye tradition," finds himself working on a very personal case as he and his adoptive father, Martin, look for the three-year-old child who may or may not be Moroni's son. Tracking down a lead, the two men end up in a virtual ghost town in the Oquirrh Mountains. All but deserted, the old mining town of Bingham Canyon is about to be evacuated and razed by the powerful Kennecott Copper Company, which is eager to get at the mineral wealth buried beneath the community. A few families are hanging on, though, including one that may be sheltering the newest Traveler. The father-son duo's efforts are hampered by the slated demolition of their offices in the Chester Building, and even more so by the antics of their fellow tenants, Mad Bill and Charlie Redwine, whose latest shenanigans have evoked the wrath of the church. With Martin trying to preserve the building and protect Bill and Charlie, Moroni continues the search-until murder rears its ugly head and the investigation moves into a whole new dimension.

Named after a Mormon saint, Moroni Traveler may be Salt Lake City's only gentile private eye that still maintains uneasy contact with the Church of Latter-day Saints. This case finds the former pro football player reluctantly accepting a charge from one of the church leaders to investigate the enigmatic, self-effacing faith healer Jason Thurgood. Traveler's commission takes him downwind of the old atomic testing sites to the desolate southwest corner of Utah, commonly known as cult country because of the long-standing activity of various polygamists and self-proclaimed prophets there. Currently the area is under the sway of Moroni's Children, a cult headed by the ruthless, power-hungry Orrin Porter. At the same time, Moroni's father and partner, Martin, is working on a missing persons case involving the young mentally handicapped son of an old friend just across the border in Nevada. Oddly, the two cases begin to converge, and the Travelers realize that the superficial answers they seek mask darker, more complex forces at work.