O' Artful Death

May 19, 2003
Freelance journalist Taylor makes a promising, if flawed, debut with an academic cozy set in rural Vermont's Byzantium, a bygone artists colony replete with a Victorian mansion, rumors of murder plots past and present and a surfeit of oddballs marooned there for the winter. Harvard art professor Sweeney St. George, invited to spend Christmas at the colony, soon finds herself immersed in a prolonged quest to find the origin of a distinctive monument in Byzantium's cemetery. Excerpts from a history of the colony help shed light on the fate of Mary Elizabeth Denholm, a farm girl employed as a maid and later as a model by the colony's rapacious founder. Sweeney's almost obsessive curiosity about poor Mary, who drowned at 18 in 1890, and the sculptor of her marble tomb becomes so intense that she (and likewise the reader) admits to being "ready for a break from Mary's gravestone." The story picks up with the unexpected slayings of locals linked to the scandal-ridden Mary, though it remains hampered by too many underdeveloped characters, notably one who proves to be the key to the ultimate resolution of Byzantium's present-day miseries. Taylor, however, does use her expert knowledge of 19th-century artwork and New England to good effect, and one can hope her plots will improve with experience.

May 1, 2003
Art historian Sweeney St. George's interest in an unusual late-Victorian gravestone sculpture takes her to a former art colony in Vermont. Her arrival coincides with the suspicious death of an old local lady who believed that the young woman in the grave Sweeney is seeking was murdered. Sweeney investigates, attempting to find out who carved the beautiful monument and what really happened to the young woman. Her search into local family backgrounds inevitably turns up clues to the old lady's murder as well. A nicely puzzled plot, a closely confined rural setting, remarkable characterizations, and eminently readable prose commend this debut to all collections.

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2003
An elegantly wrought first mystery with layers within layers like carved ivory balls. Twenty-eight-year-old Sweeney St. George--her father an artist suicide, her estranged mother an alcoholic--is an art historian specializing in representations of death. A gorgeous and highly unusual marble grave marker of a young woman in Vermont catches her attention, and she accepts her friend Toby's invitation to spend Christmas at his family's home, in the village of Byzantium, Vermont, near the location of the grave marker and a famed nineteenth-century art colony. Even before she arrives for the holidays and the beginning of her research, there's a murder. Petty and gross thievery and another killing intertwine with family secrets and town tensions, as Sweeney methodically patterns her research and slowly reveals the depths of her own sorrows. She's a vivid and attractive sleuth, and the iconography of graves and death, hidden meanings in diaries and inscriptions, and some complicated personal relationships sweep one past an overstuffed plot and a slightly wobbly denouement. Rich and rewarding reading.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)