The debut nominated for an Agatha Award
IT'S THE HOLIDAY SEASON and as winter falls starkly over Boston, Sweeney's worried about her career and grappling with some personal demons. When her best friend shows her photographs of an atypical gravestone in a seemingly idyllic Vermont town that was once a famous arts colony, she's interested enough to look into the history of the bizarre monumental sculpture — and the life and untimely demise of the young artist's model buried beneath it. But her inquiries are followed by a suspicious death, and as Sweeney becomes more and more obsessed with the anomalous stone, she is drawn to Vermont and into a hundred-year-old murder mystery and the lives of a family and their neighbors in the colony. Before long, she has another murder on her hands and she's in a race to find out the truth about the gravestone.