Brigham's Day - Hardcover

Gates, John

2.94

16 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802733441 ISBN 13: 9780802733443

Publisher: Walker & Co, 2000

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In Kanab, Utah, Brigham Bybee, an attorney with a clouded past, is assigned to defend a murder suspect, but as he investigates, Bybee realizes that not only is his client being set up, so is he.

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Review:

Brig Bybee is a Utah lawyer with a history of challenging the powers- that-be in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. That is not how a brilliant criminal attorney gets ahead in Kanab, where this well-written suspense novel is set. The background of the standard plot (personally troubled, professionally played-out lawyer boxed in by a judge who makes him take second chair to another lawyer in defending a young man charged with murder) gets a nifty historical context as it relates to a century-old massacre in a stronghold of Brigham Young and his devotees.

Bybee's co-counsel is a hotheaded young lawyer who believes there's a connection between trumped-up charges against their client and the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, for which the Mormon Church hierarchy may have framed another innocent man. Granted a second chance at happiness, Bybee, who lost his first wife and daughter in the unpopular pursuit of justice last time out, is falling in love with the granddaughter of the man his client supposedly murdered. He's also trying to rein in his unpredictable colleague, who has reason to believe that the church has framed Owen Parks, just the way they framed John Lee over a century ago. This time it's through a posse known as the Daughters of Zion, who would do anything to protect the reputation of the church's founder and the powerful Mormon hierarchy that guards its secrets just as forcefully today as it did then. Brig is an interesting protagonist, and the history of Utah's settlement is a fascinating story. Author John Gates, a Utah native, tells it well enough to make the reader hope for a second chance, and a second outing, for his hero. --Jane Adams

From Kirkus Reviews:

Atmospheric legal procedural that peers into the uninviting shadows cast by the Church of the Latter-day Saints on contemporary and historical Utah.After defense lawyer Brigham Bybee failed to win a high-profile lawsuit brought by a teenaged rape victim against a powerful Mormon church elder, he started to hit the bottle, his wife divorced him, and he was almost disbarred. Now, after a year of sobriety, Bybee, who was raised by Mormon parents but has never numbered himself among the Saints, is tapped by aging circuit judge Reed Macklesprang to be second banana on the legal team defending Owen Parks, an illiterate drifter accused of murdering Mormon Doug Farnsworth. Though the evidence against Parks is slight, Bybee senses that Macklesprang hopes Bybee’s history of ineptitude, and the obnoxious shenanigans of lead defense lawyer Ronnie Watters, will lead to a quick conviction. Against his better judgment, Bybee becomes friendly with Farnsworth's beautiful, crippled granddaughter, Zolene Swapp (the characters' odd Mormon names are a running joke). Of course, Zolene knows more about her grandfather's dealings with the church hierarchy than she's willing to admit. Could this be the reason that she vomits after having torrid sex with Bybee in a muddy mountain lake? When Watters is found dead in the same lake, Bybee learns of a letter that has been passed down through the family from one of the original participants in the 1857 slaughter of more than a hundred innocent men, women and children at Mountain Meadows. Can he use the letter, and the conscience of the enormously fat Sheriff LaGrand Little, to save his client, avenge Farnsworth’s death, and vanquish an old enemy?Newcomer Gates, a Utah native practicing law in Texas, turns a wonderfully jaundiced eye on the beauty and grotesqueries of his home state, and on the disquieting Mormon fringe culture that seems to hold it in an iron grip.Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selection -- Copyright � 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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