by Ben Boulden
Mystery
writer and journalist Betty Webb made a literary splash when her second Lena
Jones detective novel, Desert Wives, was published by Poisoned Pen Press
in 2002. The likable Lena – an orphan and socially-conscious private eye
working the upscale Phoenix, Arizona suburb of Scottsdale – finds more than
murder while undercover in the fictional polygamist town of Purity on the
Utah-Arizona border. This swath of arid desert is called the Arizona Strip and
home to more sheep than people, and more religious sects practicing polygyny –
a form of polygamy where one man marries multiple women – than anywhere else in
the United States. Including the infamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), headquartered in Colorado City, Arizona, and its
outlaw “prophet” Warren Jeffs. Publishers Weekly called Desert Wives,
“a searing exposĂ© of the abuses of contemporary polygamy,” and then added,
“[it] could do for polygamy what [Stowe’s] Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for slavery.”
Marilyn
Stasio, The New York Times’ well-respected mystery critic, wrote:
“If Betty Webb had gone undercover and written Desert Wives as a piece of investigative journalism, she’d probably be up for a Pulitzer.”
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