Summary
Death is also a fixation for [Sarah Stewart Taylor]'s amateur detective protagonist, Sweeney St. George -- a willowy, redheaded art history professor with a formidable back story. In Taylor's debut novel, O' Artful Death, Sweeney's fascination with an anachronistic marble tombstone plunged her into the shady secrets of an artists' colony in Vermont. For the sequel, Taylor has moved her action to the Boston area, where Sweeney teaches a seminar on "Mourning Objects" at a university -- unnamed, but clearly Harvard. When one of her students is found suffocated, his body adorned with pieces of Victorian jewelry, Sweeney resumes her role as an inspired meddler in official police investigations.
It's an ambitious recipe, and the ingredients don't blend as well in Mansions as they did in Taylor's first novel. The story has so many subplots and red herrings that some of them end up seeming extraneous or simply half-baked. Homicide detective Timothy Quinn, for instance, is a figure as moody as Sweeney or [Brad Putnam]. He quotes Keats as he juggles the Putnam case and life at home with a severely depressed wife. But the implied parallel between Quinn's problems and Sweeney's isn't sufficiently explored, and his deference to her deductions is hard to believe."Oh. I'm sorry." He'd hesitated, and then he'd stammered on. "I heard about how it happened, about how it was an explosion and they never caught the person or people or whatever who did it and I was just wondering..." He'd stopped there, as though he was trying to figure out what to say. "Have you ever, when you were doing research or something, have you ever found out something about somebody, something that would change everything, change the way people looked at things?"See the full content of this document
Extract
Dead Reckoning; Mansions of the Dead, by Sarah Stewart Taylor
When it comes to ingenious ways of mourning the dead, the Victorians sure had us beat. In the opening pages of Hartland author Sarah Stewart Taylor's new mystery, a young widow in 1863 Boston fingers the "hairwork" necklace she's made to commemorate her rich husband. "By working the locks of hair around a mold to make twenty intricately netted balls and then stringing them t...
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