Saints & Sinners

Andrew Hunt will be in conversation with Peter Joseph, the editor of St. Martin’s Press, at noon Saturday, Nov. 10, at the Tony Hillerman Writers Conference at Hotel Santa Fe, 1501 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. And at 2 p.m. Saturday, Hunt will discuss and sign “City of Saints” at Garcia Street Books, 376 Garcia St., Santa Fe.

Andrew Hunt’s award-winning novel “City of Saints” is a fictionalized version of a true crime murder of a socialite in Salt Lake City in 1930. Hunt’s mystery takes place in the same city and in the same year.

And the author’s conversational narrative style, character descriptions and dialogue combine to make the mystery an intriguing period piece.

Meanwhile, police try to solve the murder of Helen Kent Pfalzgraf, the restless wife of a prominent Salt Lake City physician who lived a double life.

The protagonist is Deputy Sheriff Art Oveson, a young, upstanding family man and churchgoing Mormon. Oveson is paired with foul-mouthed, cynical deputy Roscoe Lund in the investigation of the Pfalzgraf case.

The novel’s central story is overlaid with subplots involving a chump of a sheriff seeking re-election; nasty sheriff’s department politics; profiles of some of the town’s respected citizens who themselves may be up to no good; incidental background about Deputy Sheriff Art Oveson and his extended family, and the history and description of the town.

The sheriff tries to use his position to redirect the probe, but despite him the investigators move along, uncovering new and useful information that ties characters together in an illegal enterprise.

These multiple aspects add up to an intriguing book that gives the reader a sense of what it may have been like in Salt Lake City 82 years ago at the start of the Great Depression.

“City of Saints” won the 2011 Tony Hillerman Prize for best debut mystery and was recently published.

	“City of Saints, A Mystery” by Andrew Hunt Minotaur Books, $24.99, 321 pp.

Hunt may be new to fiction writing, but he’s written two works of nonfiction and co-wrote “The 1980s.” Reared in Salt Lake, he’s a professor of history at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.

In an afterword to “City of Saints,” Hunt says the novel is based on the unsolved homicide of socialite Dorothy Dexter Moormeister. He writes that the Moormeister case prompted articles in recent years, especially in Salt Lake publications, “but these proved to be little more than fleeting footnotes to an otherwise forgotten case.”