Moroni Traveler

Moroni Traveler finds it a blessing and a curse to be named for the angel that graces the top of the temple looming over Brigham Young's city. The ex-football star turned private detective has returned to Salt Lake City, a town he once called home. During a spring blizzard, Moroni meets Penny Varney, the ungodly daughter of a powerful high churchman. She retains him to find her mother - whom she fears is dead. His boyhood friend, Willis Tanner, also solicits his services on the same day.

Salt Lake City is hotter than hell. The Church of the Latter-day Saints is about to celebrate Pioneer Day, in honor of the Saints who crossed half a continent searching for a home. And in the sun-scorched streets, PI Moroni Traveler, fallen Saint and former football star, is searching for a vicious serial killer. The murderer's calling card is a videotape of his beautiful victims - beautiful before the self-styled "Jack the Ripper" vents his savage, woman-hating rage.

Ace shortstop Pepper Dalton has finally learned to hit - or so it seems to the good people of Salt Lake City. Moroni Traveler, a private eye named for an angel and cut from the same cloth as his hell-bent father, is hired to prove that Pepper did not kill his sister with a baseball bat. A boyhood hero of Moroni's, Pepper is living, potbellied proof that the past, like everything else, just ain't what it used to be.

Moroni Traveler, a PI named for an angel, is an outsider - an unwanted unbeliever determined to discover the truth about a dead woman. Branded a devil and greeted with violence, Moroni launches into an investigation that leads him into a smoldering thicket of rumor and concealment. Two people have already been killed. When the case turns brutally personal, there's no going back, and Moroni will journey through hell to ensure that vengeance will be his.

Salt Lake City private investigators, Moroni and his father, Martin, maintain an uneasy truce with the Church of Latter-day Saints. But Moroni owes a debt to his boyhood friend Willis Tanner, now one of the top-ranking officials in the LDS, and Willis has come to collect. Lael Woolley, grandniece of the First Prophet, the head of the Mormon church on earth, has been kidnapped, and the prophet believes only Traveler, a Gentile, can rescue her.

Major Lewis Stiles is dying of cancer, but he wants all his affairs in order before he is "called home". To that end he wants to hire Moroni Traveler and his father Martin to track down one of the prisoners he was responsible for during World War II. Unseen since his mysterious disappearance from the POW camp at Cowdery Junction, Utah, Karl Falke is still owed $132.07 in back pay, and Stiles wants Falke to receive his due.