FULL REVIEW: by Lindsay Hansen Park

Electrifying storytelling meets historical reckoning in a tale of frontier faith, family, and fatal consequence…

In No Forgiveness: Family, Polygamy, Murder, and Justice among Idaho’s Pioneering Mormons, Daniel H. Neal delivers a riveting, meticulously researched narrative that plunges readers into the spiritual, emotional, and legal heart of early 20th-century Mormon life in the American West. At its core is the shocking 1911 murder of Neal’s own grandfather, schoolteacher David S. Neal by a neighbor and fellow Mormon settler in the quiet, hard-fought farmlands of Idaho’s Teton Basin. But this book is far more than a true crime account. It is a vivid, haunting portrait of a faith in transition, a frontier society under pressure, and the deeply human costs of religious idealism and social isolation.

Neal’s storytelling is clear and compelling. His prose walks the delicate line between journalistic clarity and emotional depth, weaving family memory with court transcripts, personal letters, church records, and regional histories. The result is a book that reads like a literary documentary that is factual and pulsing with feeling. The pacing is tight, the dialogue feels authentic, and the unfolding of events, particularly the moments before and after the murder is rendered with cinematic intensity.

One of the book’s greatest contributions is its grounded and empathetic depiction of Mormon history beyond Utah. Neal brings to light the lived experiences of Mormon families on the periphery, those who carried the church’s theology and culture into rural Idaho, navigating the tensions between American law, religious belief, and harsh landscape. His detailed reconstruction of polygamous households, water disputes, ecclesiastical leadership, and pioneer customs offers a textured view of how Mormon ideals were both lived and tested. It is a significant addition to the growing body of regional Mormon histories that complicate and deepen our understanding of the broader Restoration movement.

Importantly, No Forgiveness does not romanticize. Neal’s treatment of plural marriage is especially resonant, presented not as moral indictment or nostalgic longing, but as a historical reality that shaped generations with enduring psychological and social consequences. His ancestors’ participation in polygamy is neither lionized nor shamed, but humanized and at times, devastating.

He writes it for what it is, an endurance test. Especially for women like Karen Marie Sorensen (Mary K) and her daughter May Lewis Neal. These women, devout and resilient, carried the invisible weight of a theology that demanded sacrifice without recognition. Neal writes them with empathy and insight, showing how polygamy shaped their strength, their silence, and their suffering. I was especially moved by the depiction of May, not only as a widow but as a product of this legacy, navigating survival, motherhood, and community expectation with quiet defiance. Her story lingers as one of the most powerful in the book, a testament to the survival strategies of women on the frontier. (Karen Marie Sorensen’s connection to Marion, Utah also casts a haunting pre-echo of the infamous Singer family standoff in the 1970s, a chilling reminder of how the spiritual and social fractures wrought by polygamy continued to echo across generations in that very landscape).

A few elements merit gentle critique. I could be wrong about this, but the occasional use of the term “Zionist” to describe early Mormon settlement may blur theological distinctions and evoke misleading modern parallels. A more accurate term would be “gathering to Zion” or “theocratic settlement”.

Additionally, the narrative’s deeply personal focus, especially in its portrayal of David Neal as an idealized ancestor, leaves limited room for alternative perspectives on the social dynamics in Darby. Neal is consistently portrayed as principled, generous, and blameless: a devoted husband, schoolteacher, and victim of irrational violence.

While this framing is understandable given the author’s familial connection, it occasionally narrows the historical lens. For example, there is limited exploration of Neal’s own role in the water dispute that precipitated the murder, or how his presence as a newcomer may have altered local power dynamics in a tightly knit Mormon farming community. By casting his grandfather as the unquestioned moral victor/victim, the book sometimes bypasses the more complex social context that might have deepened its portrait of justice and neighborly conflict on the frontier. Sometimes descendants have to work harder to earn the trust of readers in this way.

Finally, while the book deftly evokes the settler experience, it remains largely silent on the Native displacement that made such settlements possible. A deeper engagement with the Indigenous context of the Teton Valley would have enriched the narrative’s scope and complexity. Especially the history of land ownership and water rights.

These are minor caveats in a work of substantial achievement. No Forgiveness is a model of how local history, when told with care and craft, can illuminate national questions, about faith and fear, justice and belonging, love and violence. It honors the messiness of inherited memory while refusing to turn away from the truth. Neal’s courage in facing down the ghosts of his own family’s past is matched only by his skill in rendering them visible for the rest of us.

This book belongs on the shelf alongside the great epics of the American West. It gives voice to the saints and skeptics, the settlers and survivors, whose stories still echo in the valleys they tried to tame. In doing so, Daniel H. Neal offers something rare and lasting: a personal history that transcends the personal, and a Mormon story that is unmistakably, indelibly American.

—Lindsay Hansen Park is an American Mormon feminist blogger, podcaster, and the executive director for the Salt Lake City-based non-profit Sunstone Education Foundation.