Pedophilia, fraud, and litigation stoke this cogent if overstuffed exposé of a lurid down-home theocracy. Journalist Weyermann probes the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a polygamist Mormon sect entrenched in the Short Creek area straddling the Utah-Arizona border. Under all-powerful Prophet Warren Jeffs, it's a fertility-cult run amok: unwilling pubescent girls are married off to lecherous church elders (Jeffs is charged with raping child-brides as young as 12); children are beaten, and adolescent boys abandoned; husbands are suddenly exiled and their wives and children given to other men; local government and police, run by the faithful, stonewall outsiders and intimidate dissidents while siphoning public funds into church leaders' pockets. It's a snake pit of bizarre theology, brainwashing, and harem rivalries clad in gingham and overalls, and Weyermann's well-researched muckraking is colorful and gripping. Unfortunately, her reporting on the coalition of runaway wives, pro-bono lawyers, and state prosecutors who challenged the Jeffs regime in recent years rambles between melodrama—"some women... find the yawning jaws of hell preferable to their situation in FLDS"—and eye-glazing court battles over FLDS real estate. Still, Weyermann presents a disturbing account of how a religious quasi-dictatorship can flourish on American soil. (Aug.)
