Stonepacker's Gold, and Fathers
Stonepacker's Gold is the story of young Willie Urgang's arrival in Salt Lake City, 1920. Fleeing a bad marriage back home in Kansas, he is quickly drawn into a romance, and through it into a convoluted struggle to obtain a stack of gold plates. So far as the Church of Latter-day Saints is concerned, the plates are worth much more than their weight, because they are rumored to be inscribed with the testimony of a certain Thomas Stonepacker, a contemporary of Samuel Brannan and Brigham Young. The efforts of the Mormons to get the plates are foiled by a wily band of Jesuits intent on publishing the plates if the testimony contradicts Joseph Smith's revelations, or melting them down if they confirm them. Among the historical figures who mix with fictional ones is Rafael Lopez, who killed several deputies and disappeared into a mine in 1912. His body was never found, and it is revealed that he escaped the mine and had devised a scheme to defraud all the interested parties, including a gaggle of Masons. A faithful translation of Thomas Stonepacker's gospel is included in the epilogue.
Roger Urgang of Fathers is Willie Urgang's adoptive great-grandson, a freshly divorced San Francisco stockbroker recently unemployed due to the dot-com bust of 2002. Roger's father has had a stroke, and needs help managing the Kansas farm on which Roger grew up. Feeling in need of a break, Roger returns to his agricultural roots and establishes a healthy love relationship that is soon rudely interrupted by a kidnapping-followed by questions about the suicide of his biological father, which lead to chilling revelations about his childhood.
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