Booked to read . . . my book tracker: Tracker 5

First 1st To Read completed!

O’Artful Death
by Sarah Stewart Taylor
An 2003 Agatha Award Finalist for Best First Novel

What a great find! After accepting this challenge, I searched Amazon for new series, and this is one of my discoveries. My postlady bravely delivered my package from Amazon on a snowy day. Yes, my south Mississippi town had an actual snow day, and I snuggled up and read Death in one sitting as the beautiful flakes slowly drifted down turning my yard into work of art itself. What a great memory!

Possession by A. S. Byatt is one of my favorite novels, and the movie based on this work is one of my favorite films - one that I rewatch from time to time. O’Artful Death is reminiscent of Possession - there is a love from a past century with a mysterious allusion to that long past relationship. Sweeney St. George, the protagonist of Death, is a professor in the Art Department whose specialty is funerary art - gravestones.

Shortly before Christmas break, Sweeney finds a photo of an intriguing gravestone/monument left on her desk. In her words, it was “weirdly anomalous”. It did not fit in with the accepted grave art of its time. It featured a death figure, a death figure with the hint of a real man’s face gazing lovingly at the figure of a beautiful young girl. According to Sweeney, by the late Victorian period grave art featured more innocent figures such as sweet cherubim not death figures. She couldn’t resist an invitation to spend Christmas in the town where this monument stood, to spend time searching for an answer to this mystery.

Death had me almost from hello. There are references to my favorite things - Edgar Allan Poe, the Arthurian Legend, even Nancy Drew and secret codes! Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott” is quoted liberally which could be a reference to Christie’s The Mirror Crack'd, another favorite.

I am going to call Death a modern gothic complex cozy mystery. Its setting is a genteel rural domestic with an amateur detective. But it has elements of the gothic - darkness, isolation, hints of past sins being visited on the present. And it is complex. It made me think and sent me to researching gravestone art. I have to admit I have always been fascinated by the idea of gravestone rubbings even though I have not actually tried this craft.

But here was this strange reaper, his figure so much more accomplished than those of his brethren on other stones. This death was a man, with a man's face somehow suggested in the familiar skull. He gazed down at the girl lying beneath him, his eyes soft, a dreamy smile playing at his bony lips. There was something familiar about the way he looked down at his prey, Sweeney realized, something loving.

Suddenly, she was afraid.. The wind had come up and the woods surrounding the house seemed sinister, full of evil. The night was so dark she could barely see the path her boots had stamped in the snow. As she turned and started for the house it was all she could do not to break into a run, and when she was finally inside, she closed the back door and locked it before it struck her that the person who'd been watching her was inside, and not outside.