Review
Title: An Unarmed Woman
Author: John Bennion
Publisher: Signature Books
Genre: Fiction
Year of Publication: 2019
Number of Pages: 295
Binding: Paper
ISBN13: 9781560852766
Price: $18.95
Reviewed by Julie J. Nichols for the Association for Mormon Letters
Whenever I picked this book up to hurry back into its gripping tale, I had to blink: I thought the cover said “An Unmarried Woman,” but I knew that wasn’t right. A Freudian dyslexia: this is in fact the story of a young unmarried woman in south central Utah during the winter of 1887 whose issues with marriage are as fraught as her issues with armaments. Guns abound. They do a lot of damage. They kill people, and they carry clues. But—interestingly—so, in this book, do marriages. Violence roils everywhere—not violence of the usual domestic type, but of the type caused by devotion to a Principle our protagonist perceives as a tangle, a perplexity, a profound problem. “Celestial marriage” and its unintended consequences are the heart of this story, and it’s a very good one.
Its characters engage us. Its ideas are nuanced. Its unraveling is well-paced, smart, and surprising. John Bennion is my friend and neighbor, but I’m not just nurturing a warm relationship when I insist that truly, you should read this book. Once you start, you won’t need me to urge you to see how it plays out as quickly as you can without missing a single relevant point (and there are a lot of them). Afterward, you won’t need me to urge you to jump back to the beginning to pick up the clues all over again.
An Unarmed Woman is a murder mystery narrated (experienced) by seventeen-year-old Rachel O’Brien Rockwood. Her stepfather married her abused mother, his fifth wife, out of the kindness of his heart. He’s affluent and intelligent, with the moxie to manage his household harmoniously, and his stepdaughter adores him. He’s taught her to hunt, to ride, to shoot, to think. But now, together on an errand in the small village of Centre, they are caught in the crossfire of their neighboring town’s deceit. Federal deputies have been hounding the polygs there, stirring up hatred against their harassment, and the plot begins when the corpses of two “deps” are left in the basement store of the Rockwoods’ good friends.
Actually, as in all good novels, the story doesn’t begin there. By the time the deed is done, we know that Rachel is chafing under her stepfather’s changing attitudes toward her. One minute he’s approving and loving, but the next he’s telling her she should be more womanly, more open to marrying in the Principle. We know, by the time the deputies’ bodies are found, that Rachel is a bit of a misfit, a slightly foulmouthed independent—she spent her childhood in Nevada with an alcoholic Gentile father–who now sees the Principle with a very skeptical eye, though she knows it saved her mother.
The interactions with her father are carefully developed to show how mixed her feelings are. She loves him, but he’s beginning to hurt her with his admonitions, and she is genuinely repulsed by the thought of marriage to some older geezer with three other wives already. She’s thin and gangly, and her sharp tongue puts everyone off except the other independent women who are her support, her friend Naomi, in love with a man who strongly disagrees with the Principle, and the town widow lady, Sister Griggs.
These subplots ripple through the frightening three days of the search for the killer of the federal deputies. There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that there will be even more trouble when authorities find out that their own have been killed by the Mormonites. Deceit and coverups are hatched and executed, but Rachel and her stepfather (a justice of the peace, with one foot in the Gentile camp himself because of this civil duty) take it upon themselves to find the killer and solve the crime before federal marshals swoop down and wreak more havoc than has already been done. They don’t quite succeed. Plot complications multiply. Things get desperate.
In the process, we meet most members of the Centre Ward. Bennion characterizes them all with unique, believable strokes. Motives aplenty exist, both for the murders and for the lies that are spread to protect the possible perpetrators and veil the probable ugly truth. Rachel’s stepfather wants to rely on physical facts (tracks in the snow, recently-fired guns). Rachel, on the other hand, sees signs in the wretched faces of the wives and children of the polygamists who have to hide or go to prison, and in the anger of the men themselves. These differing kinds of clues add to the tension—neither is always helpful.
Many things work well here: the development of the characters; the frustration of the investigation; the building of the suspense; Rachel’s aching desires to prove herself to her stepfather and make sense of his mixed behaviors. The setting works, too—the desert valleys and steep mountain slopes of late 19th-century Rush Lake Valley are vividly represented. We smell fresh bread, horse manure, snow falling. We’re cold to the bone and uncomfortable in a sidesaddle. A map drawn by Bennion’s daughter makes excellent sense; we can easily see how the chase plays out.
I had to suspend my immersion in the story at times. Rachel’s attitude has a distinctly 21st-century flavor, and some of her decisions are puzzling or jarring. Overall, though, the novel is well worth reading twice. The end is inevitable, as all good murder mysteries must seem to be. Though all does not end happily, there are answers enough, and life in Centre will go forward, though changed.
A notice on the endpaper says that a sequel is in the works entitled Ezekiel’s Third Wife. To that I say hurrah—with a note of dismay. We need to see more of Rachel. She needs to grow up and do more good. She’s an unarmed and unmarried woman to be contended with. But I don’t want her to be Ezekiel’s third wife. Surely, in so many matters of craft and content, Bennion is quietly directing our attention to the ways contemporary authoritarian leaders cause more problems than they prevent when they overlook the effects of their “principles” on real-life human individuals and families. In whatever sequel we see, I want Rachel to live her dreams outside the Principle and prove its perpetuators wrong. I hope Bennion proves me right.