Still As Death (Sweeney St. George Mysteries) - Tapa dura

Art history professor Sweeney St. George is in the middle of putting together an exhibit on her specialty, “the art of death,” for the university museum when she makes an unusual discovery: A valuable piece of Egyptian funerary jewelry that should be in the museum’s collection seems to be missing. Searching for answers, Sweeney learns that a student intern at the museum was the last person to check out the piece, a young woman who died of an apparent suicide soon after she handled the piece, more than twenty-five years ago.
 Going on with the exhibition without the intricately beaded Egyptian collar, Sweeney can’t let it drop altogether. Nor can she forget the student, Karen Philips, who died just a few months after working with the piece. A little digging shows that Karen was working at the museum the night it was robbed, that same year, and Sweeney becomes even more curious. But her interest in mysteries past pales when a present-day murder brings Sweeney and her colleagues at the museum under the Cambridge Police Department spotlight in the person of Detective Tim Quinn, whom Sweeney has worked with before.
 In the latest installment in this rich and fascinating series, Sweeney and Tim go after a killer, trying to resolve questions both immediate and decades-old before it’s too late.

Praise for Sarah Stewart Taylor

"Sweeney has to solve more than one mystery in this richly textured tale involving complicated family histories stretching back to the days of the Minute Men."
---Publishers Weekly on Judgment of the Grave

"Ms. Taylor gives the reader a real sense of what Concord and its graveyards look like. And enough false leads appear to keep the reader guessing and reading on."
---The Washington Times on Judgment of the Grave

"The well-written Mansions is not simply a good story, it's bolstered by interesting, well-researched insights into an artistic specialty well suited to murder."
---Chicago Tribune on Mansions of the Dead

"Taylor's is one of those mystery series where readers are educated as well as entertained.... Mansions of the Dead is agreeably tricked out with red herrings and jarring switches in mood: Just as readers settle in for an academic cozy, the atmosphere changes, and disaster that has the coarse feel of reality intrudes."
---The Washington Post Book World on Mansions of the Dead

"Pull up an overstuffed chair and drift away."
---Chicago Tribune on O' Artful Death

"A strikingly atmospheric debut. The writing is crisp and the characters all quite forcefully alive, especially Sweeney."
---Denver Post on O' Artful Death

"Taylor does a lovely job of setting an atmospheric scene and luring us inside."
---Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review on O' Artful Death