****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
As she did in The Bishop's Wife, Mette Harrison takes on several big projects at once in His Right Hand. On one hand, she provides an honest, warts-and-all (but also decency-and-all) portrait of a Mormon ward. As with most modern mysteries, her project is partially anthropological. She writes from the inside of the Utah-Mormon community in a way that makes that community accessible to outsiders.At the same time, both novels try to prod the people inside the Mormon community to better behavior. The Bishop's Wife deals with the issue of sexual abuse. His Right Hand deals with issues of sexual and gender identity among the Saints--especially when combined with ecclesiastical authority. The core mystery is the murder of a male priesthood holder (and Bishop's counselor) who is revealed, after death, to have been biologically female. As in the previous novel, the mystery is complicated by traditional Mormon attitudes towards sex and towards authority.Harrison's heroine, Linda Waldheim, must negotiate these issues from her officially marginal role as the bishop's wife. This turns out to be the best place to investigate things, however, because the margins is where most of the good stuff happens. Over and over again, Linda discovers that most of the important things in the ward happen outside of the corridors of ecclesiastical power--in the lives of its women, young people, troublemakers, and near-apostates. Because she has access to these people--who trust her in ways they will never trust her husband--Linda can piece together the real stories lurking beneath the official ones that everybody is supposed to believe.I found His Right Hand to be a stronger novel than The Bishop's Wife (which was also pretty darn good). In the second novel, Harrison creates a tighter mystery, and though there are still substantial subplots, they are clearly subordinated to the primary mystery in ways that they were not in The Bishop's Wife, which occasionally allowed its subplots to take over. Harrison's voice is also more certain in His Right Hand--she does not come off as at all apologetic 1) for being a Mormon; or 2) for not believing everything that most Mormons believe and even some thing that have been declared official doctrine by the LDS Church.Both Linda Waldheim and Mette Harrison have become more mature and more confident in their second outing together. I am excited to see where they both go from here.
