Under the Banner of Heaven

Krakauer examines the Lafferty brothers' religiously motivated murder of their sister-in-law and infant niece as an entry point into the history of fundamentalist Mormon violence. The cult logic is meticulously reconstructed — the steps from faith to certainty to atrocity are terrifyingly legible. The horror of the case is that the reasoning is internally coherent at every step. That is Krakauer's real subject.