The fact page
Every novel that uses real history owes its readers an accounting. This one begins with it.
The Danites were real. They were organized at Far West, Missouri, in the summer of 1838 by a physician named Sampson Avard, under oaths of secrecy, and were known to their enemies and to themselves as Destroying Angels.
The Mormon colonies in Chihuahua, Mexico, were real. They were founded in 1885 so that Latter-day Saints with more than one wife could live beyond the reach of United States marshals, and plural marriages continued to be performed there, with the knowledge of Church leaders, for fourteen years after the Church publicly announced that the practice had ended.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints published detailed annual financial reports to its members from 1915 until 1959. It has not published one since.
The historical facts about the Church’s founder, its early leaders, its doctrines, and its money that the characters in this novel discover are drawn from the Church’s own published records, essays, and manuals, and are cited in the notes at the end of the book.
The Church, its history, and the gap between what it knows about itself and what it tells its members are not.
The story
Hyrum Hatch was recruited at twenty-two: fluent, cleared, obedient, exactly what the Agency looks for in a returned missionary. Fifteen years later a man he was raised to obey asks him for a favor, and the favor is a body.
Afton Harper is an accountant on the fourteenth floor of the Church Office Building. She finds a construction contractor being paid four times what the work is worth, traces it, and discovers the payments have been running since 1963.
What they each pull on leads to the same place: a hacienda in Chihuahua, a handshake nobody wrote down, and a hundred and forty years of an arrangement that was never a partnership. It was rent.
A thriller about tradecraft, inherited faith, and what an institution owes the people who fund it.
85,000 words · 33 chapters · about 380 pages · 4,800 words of source notes
Editions
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Ebook
- 85,000 words · 33 chapters · 380 pages
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Paperback
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The first three chapters, free
No app, no account, no email address. It opens in your browser and remembers where you stopped. Adjust the text size if you need it bigger, which most of us do.
Roughly 10,000 words: Hyrum being hunted through the woods at the Farm, the recruiter who knew exactly what a returned missionary is worth, and a man in Farmington whose job is making sure certain questions never surface.
Buyers get the same reader with all 33 chapters, plus the EPUB and PDF to keep.
On sources
The conspiracy in this novel is invented. The history the characters uncover is not, and the book ends with roughly 4,800 words of chapter-by-chapter notes so any reader can check it.
Wherever possible the sources are the Church’s own: the Gospel Topics Essays, the Joseph Smith Papers, the Journal of Discourses, Church-published manuals, and BYU Studies, which the Church owns. Where a fact rests on an outside historian or a critic, the note says so.
A sample of what is documented
- 01The Danites, 1838. Joseph Smith Papers, glossary entries “Danites” and “Avard, Sampson”; Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, ch. 19.
- 02Plural marriage after the 1890 Manifesto. The Church’s own essay “The Manifesto and the End of Plural Marriage” acknowledges marriages continued with the sanction of some leaders; Quinn, Dialogue 18:1 (1985).
- 03The colonies in Mexico. Romney, The Mormon Colonies in Mexico; Tullis, Mormons in Mexico; Church History Topics, “Colonies in Mexico.”
- 04The Book of Abraham papyri. Gospel Topics Essay: “None of the characters on the papyrus fragments mentioned Abraham’s name or any of the events recorded in the book of Abraham.”
- 05Thirteen shell companies. SEC press release 2023-35: Ensign Peak filed under thirteen shell LLCs from 1997 to 2019; $4m and $1m penalties; portfolio approx. $32bn by 2018.
- 06Church audits. IRC §7611 requires a high-level Treasury official’s written authorization before the IRS may open a church tax inquiry; churches file no Form 990.
- 07Recruiting at BYU. Johnson & Weitzman, eds., The FBI and Religion (University of California Press, 2017).
No arrangement like the one in this novel has been documented, alleged in any legal proceeding, or reported by any credible outlet. That sentence is in the book, and it belongs here too.
The author
Wick Burlson writes under a pen name. He was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He served a mission and was married in the temple after he came home. His family were with Joseph and Brigham from the beginning.
He left years later, after finding information he could not reconcile: material that did not square with the narrative he had been taught, most of it published by the Church itself.
He spent two decades in the defense and military intelligence community and holds a master’s degree in strategic intelligence. He is an airline pilot.
He is not interested in taking anyone’s faith. He is interested in the distance between what an institution knows about itself and what it tells the people who trust it.