The 4 O'Clock Murders

Black humor abounds in this American gothic horror story of breakaway Mormon fundamentalists gone mad. Anderson, coauthor of WarZones , provides a riveting, dark history of Mormonism through the prism of several generations of the LeBaron family, who followed Mormonism's abandoned tenets of polygamy and blood atonement as well as its tendency to excuse ``the most dubious pronouncements and personality traits of so-called prophets.'' The central figure of the saga is the self-proclaimed prophet Ervil LeBaron, who had 13 wives and 60 children, and ordered killings of his ``enemies''--including his brother and daughter--that started in the 1950s and purportedly continue to the present although LeBaron died in 1981. Anderson chronicles the intrigues of LeBaron and his minions throughout the American Southwest and Mexico in copious, sometimes numbing detail, but always with a tart tongue. (Jan.)