Three fine mysteries usher us into fascinating realms: the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, the Hapner Museum of Art in Cambridge, Mass., the Ute reservation in Colorado, and Tonapah Flats, Utah.
Sarah Stewart Taylor in Still as Death (St. Martin's Minotaur, 304 pages, $24.95) spins a complex yarn about museum politics, illicit relations between students and teachers, and feminists, factotums and felons, built around Sweeney St. George's exhibition on funerary art from Egypt to the present, entitled "Still as Death."
Someone clobbers Olga Levitch, a museum maid. Someone else falls from a fourth-floor balcony. What did happen on an archaeological dig in Egypt? Why did the student, Karen Philips, tied up in a robbery at the museum in 1979, later commit suicide? And where is the beautiful beaded collar that seems to have been misplaced?
Taylor has a good eye for chicanery and weaves a vicious web of sexual exploitation, the compulsion to own and possess, big money, illegal collections, skullduggery and deceit that keeps the reader guessing. Her eye for art is keen as well, and St. George's exhibition nicely embodies notions of the afterlife and what her characters are willing to do to get their hands on glittering goods.
© 2006 Providence Journal