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 gravestones 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.
Booklist — May 1, 2003
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