The Celestial Kingdom

She was the third wife of a bishop who believed his settlement was beyond the law's reach. She was going to meet a man with a horse in the dark. She never got there.

Beaver, Utah. September 1898. Miriam Pryce, third wife of Bishop Harmon Pryce of the closed polygamous settlement at Cedar Rest, has been found dead at the bottom of Sulphur Canyon. The deputy marshal rode out, looked at the canyon, and was back in Beaver for supper.

Reverend Elias Cane arrives to serve the small Methodist mission and finds that someone in the town is not satisfied with the deputy's verdict. Miriam's sister Ruth was afraid for her before she died. Agnes Whitfield at the mission has been afraid for Ruth ever since.

Cane rides twenty miles south into the canyon country and finds a settlement that manages its own affairs, a bishop who knows more than he is saying, and a man named Thomas Kimball who is always exactly where things happen. The ground at the south end of Sulphur Canyon tells a different story than the one the settlement has agreed to tell.

The Celestial Kingdom — the fourteenth Circuit Rider Mystery from Jim Head. A story about what happens when the walls built to protect a community become the walls that trap it