First, there's an out-of-towner, Ebershoff, a native Californian, no less, and a Gentile - raised Episcopalian, that is -now a prominent New York writer and editor, who found the subject of his third novel in the archives of Utah history. Seven years ago, he stumbled across Ann Eliza Young's 1875 memoir, "Wife No. 19 or The Story of a Life in Bondage." She was the most famous disaffected ex-wife of Brigham Young, who fled Utah and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to become a prominent anti-polygamy crusader.

Then, the 39-year-old writer set to work mining this mother lode. The result is an epic 507-page historical and contemporary novel, just the latest example of the genre of polygamy stories, what Salt Lake City bookseller Ken Sanders terms a "rich, rich giant body of work that literally goes back to the 1850s."

As Utahns know, all of this plays well to a national audience.

Polygamy story sells: Post HBO's "Big Love," post the Texas raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints' Yearning for Zion ranch, Ebershoff's novel has created a national stir in a mostly quiet literary season.

Prominent reviews greeted its publication- from The New York Times to the Los Angeles Times, from People to O magazine - that helped catapult "The 19th Wife" onto best-seller lists in Southern California and New York.

Just a month after its release, the book has already received four printings, now with more than 100,000 copies in print, "an enormous number for literary fiction," says Jynne Dilling Martin, assistant director of publicity for Random House. In publicity materials, the publishing house stresses "this is NOT an anti-Mormon book," and the publicist credits Ebershoff's extensive research for grounding his Utah characters in both pioneer and contemporary times.

The novel's timing seems particularly fortuitous. Nationally, "it's a big year for all things LDS," is how Anne Holman tells it. She's the manager of The King's English Bookshop, which will host Ebershoff at the author's first Utah reading on Sept. 12, where his appearance is expected to be one of the season's biggest local literary events.

Nationally, critics have uniformly praised the novel's literary ambitions, even as reviewers have argued about the success of its storytelling.

In the Los Angeles Times, Utah-born novelist Judith Freeman began her analysis with this question: "Has there ever been a more salacious subject than polygamy?" before summarizing Ebershoff's novel as "a big book, in every sense of the word."

In The New York Times, Janet Maslin was less forgiving. "What [Ebershoff] has replicated just as powerfully as the turbulent history of polygamy in America is the exhaustive, arid scholarly process of looking things up," Maslin wrote."Far from bringing him closer to his characters, it muffles his novel's drama."

Compelling voices: Here in Utah, the book's unusual structure - with its juxtapositions of historical and contemporary stories - prompts intriguing questions. Ebershoff has crafted a smart novel, and his research has helped him avoid many of the pitfalls of writing about the complexities of Mormon history. He's particularly deft at creating compelling first-person narrators, even if those voices won't quite ring true for insiders and historians.

Perhaps most controversial for local readers, though, particularly mainstream Mormons, might be the way Ebershoff knowingly and convincingly links the history of frontier-era polygamy with the current practices of fundmentalists.

In some ways, this novel with ripped-from-the-headlines currency raises similar ethical questions about shades of truth as recent dustups about fabrications in nonfiction memoirs.

After all, Ebershoff borrowed the true-life historical outline of a woman's life to embroider a fictional character of the same name. Then the writer juxtaposed his fictional Ann Eliza against an even more sensationalistic soap opera: a murder mystery, set among a contemporary polygamous sect, a splinter Mormon group known as the Firsts.

Jordan Scott, an exiled lost boy now grown up, returns to the Southern Utah town of his childhood - the real-life Hildale has been renamed "Mesadale" - to try to clear his mother's name. She's BeckyLyn Scott, the faithful 19th wife, accused of murdering her husband.

Twin narrators: In chapters that read like an iPod set to "shuffle," the novel channels Ann Eliza and Jordan, contrasting a more distanced, 19th-century narrator with the profane sarcasm of a contemporary young adult, who happens to be gay. Jordan is well-armed with a caustic sense of humor that plays like a redneck version of Holden Caulfield.

In the historical story, others chime in as well, to contradict or corroborate Ann Eliza's version of truth. In the contemporary story, Jordan's view is enriched by other nuanced characters, including his new boyfriend, Tom, an optimistic, gay, former Mormon who believes in a big-tent version of faith and is still comforted by wearing his LDS-issue garments.

"All of this came out of the material," Ebershoff said in a phone interview, speaking about the novel originally sparked by the incongruity of the numeral "19" modifying the word "wife." "I realized, depending on whose point of view, this story is different. I thought this kind of structure would allow a conversation within the book itself, because that's really how polygamy has been discussed in the United States, with people debating it."

Perhaps as unusual as "The 19th Wife's" structure is the fact that the historic polygamy story has been fused with a thriller. Writing a murder mystery allowed the writer to explore larger questions about the mysteries of religious faith. "I thought an actual mystery would help illuminate the idea," Ebershoff said.

In addition to its twined narrators, the novel includes snippets of mock documents, fictionalized excerpts from Ann Eliza's memoirs, handbills advertising her public speeches, a prison diary from Brigham Young, text messages, Wikipedia entries, a hymn of praise written by a plural wife, official policy statements about the use of the LDS church archives, and footnoted memos from a young Brigham Young University student outlining her historical research project.

It's the suggested accuracy of these pseudo-artifacts that makes "The 19th Wife" problematic, says scholar Martha Bradley, dean of the honors college at the University of Utah. The documents serve to create "an illusion of authenticity that doesn't really hold up," says Bradley, who has studied polygamy in frontier and contemporary eras. "Not as fiction, but as history, it kind of circles the truth."

It's not that the facts are wrong, but gaps in the historical records are filled in with contemporary attitudes about relationships and religious faith. In the same way, without firsthand knowledge, readers might assume the fictional story of Jordan Scott, and his accounts of "f**k books," and habitual drug-dealing, incest and welfare fraud, applies to all contemporary polygamist groups.

"If I gave this book to someone who really wasn't familiar with all the narratives of polygamy, I would caution them that this is a work of fiction," Bradley said. "As is almost always true in fiction, the stories are playing out in the context of the real world."