An Unarmed Woman
Signature Books, 2019
Rachel O’Brien Rockwood, like her stepfather J. D., longs to hunt criminals and other miscreants. So when, in 1887, during the height of US anti-polygamy legislation, two federal deputies on the lookout for Mormon polygamists are murdered in the small village of Centre, west of Salt Lake City, she jumps at the chance to join the investigation. But detecting never runs smoothly—Rachel and J. D. butt heads regularly over method and approach. Rachel favors talking and uncovering motives. J. D. prefers tracking and searching for the murder weapon. Also there are too many suspects—nearly every villager wanted the deputies gone. As fast as J. D. and Rachel can uncover clues, the local Mormon bishop brushes them aside, insisting instead that the deputies committed thievery and fled westward. Whose theory is true—Rachel’s, J. D.’s, the bishop’s? Or will the story be shaped by the federal marshal, openly hostile to all things Mormon?
Review by Philip Snyder at Faculty Book Lunch:
Rachel O’Brien Rockwood, the feisty almost-18-year-old narrator-protagonist of John Bennion’s wonderful historical novel An Unarmed Woman, is not unarmed in the same sense as Walker’s indomitable Sofia. What Rachel turns her hand to, from horse driving to mystery sleuthing, holds no real threat of physical violence, although she does possess an independent spirit, a capacity for inventive swearing, and a persistent passion for justice. As her step-father, 70-year-old patriarch J. D. Rockwood, observes to her as the novel opens, “You have a tripping light tongue. . . . It’s all of a pattern, Rachel, your swearing, stubbornness, sharpness of tongue. . . . In many ways you’re mannish—more full of mind than heart.” Here J. D. identifies precisely the most fearsome weapon Rachel has at her disposal—her speculative, analytical mind. Further, as the novel progresses, Rachel also demonstrates that she has plenty of heart to go with it, achieving a proper and necessary balance between ratiocination and reconciliation.
It’s Rachel’s “mannish” ways, however, that endear her most to J. D. and make them fast, if sometimes ornery, friends and companions. In fact, he’s the very one who encouraged them in her. Their unusual partnership is essential to solving the murder of two deputy sheriffs who have been prowling about Centre, a small town in 1887 Rush Lake Valley, looking to arrest men with plural wives as part of the government’s crackdown on Mormon polygamy in Utah. Bennion’s mystery plot unfolds nicely with the genre’s requisite twists and turns, fitting climax, and satisfying denouement, but the real charm and engagement of his novel—besides his vibrant narrator and her interaction with other well-drawn characters—lie in the sensational historical, cultural, environmental, meteorological, and technical textures of his setting.
Much like Tony Hillerman in his Four Corners Leaphorn / Chee mysteries or C. J. Box in his Wyoming Joe Pickett mysteries, Bennion makes these rich concrete details as compelling and evocative as the characters and plot: descriptions of various hidey holes to escape detection by the “deps,” unharnessing a team of horses after a cold, snowy surrey ride, local impact of the Edmunds-Tucker Act, qualities of snow in the Utah desert, luxury of owning a Monarch stove, cufflinks carved from deer teeth on a linen shirt, assorted contents of a dead man’s saddle bags, grating dried apples to make Brown Betty after a ward fast, killing capacities of various firearms in town, perils of riding to the rescue side-saddle, and so forth.
All of the foregoing combine to make An Unarmed Woman a thoroughly complete historical mystery novel and, as Rachel herself might say, a “perishing sleakit” of a good read.