Mormon Church and Trans Spirit Medium Meet in Riveting New Historical Crime Novel

SALT LAKE CITY - EntSun -- The year: 1908. The place: Salt Lake City, Utah. A Bad Deal in Mormon Land, the long-anticipated third novel by T.I.M. Wirkus (they/them), delves into the last time and place one would expect to find a trans spirit medium. However, Wirkus has always been one to take risks. Pulitzer prize-winning author Percival Everett said of the author's last novel, The Infinite Future, "Entertaining, fun and very, very smart, the story is everywhere at once, but never lost. This is a house of mirrors worth entering."

A lover of the disruptive and of the absurd, Wirkus says, "It's a wild and chaotic era, and seemed like a great setting for a novel featuring a bunch of characters with conflicting agendas being thrown together and making a big mess." Their novel doesn't disappoint. It bends genre, taking on elements of historical, crime, and mystery, along with a complex cast of characters. When Madame Ilsa von Hoffmann accepts a mysterious job in Salt Lake City, dead bodies begin to accumulate around her, and she worries less and less about saving her career, and more about making it out of Salt Lake City alive.

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T.I.M. was inspired to write the novel after conducting research on the era for a different project. "You have exciting labor movement stuff happening across the country. You have socialism and anarchism and feminism being discussed and embraced in a big way, and transformative technological innovations like the widespread use of electricity." The author's inspiration also came from big changes in the Mormon church. They say, "The LDS Church is in this moment of identity crisis; they're abandoning polygamy during this time and trying to figure out what defines them, if not plural marriage." In A Bad Deal in Mormon Land, the absurd and the real sit side-by-side, and the spirited Madame Ilsa will have readers rooting for a new kind of heroine.

A Bad Deal in Mormon Land will be published on October 1, 2026, and is available now for pre-order from the publisher, Type Eighteen Books at:

https://typeeighteenbooks.com/product/a-bad-deal-in-mormon-land/