THE ARTIFACTS OF DEATH always seem so alluring in Sarah Stewart Taylor's romantic mysteries featuring Sweeney St. George, a young art historian from Cambridge, Mass., who specializes in funerary art. Cooing over the morbid death masks, Victorian mourning jewelry, post-mortem photographs of children and Egyptian burial items that she's assembling for a museum show in Still As Death (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95), Sweeney prettily airs her theory that funerary art has less to do with the "afterlife" of the departed than with easing "life after" for their loved ones. Comfortable though she may be among the dusty dead of history, Sweeney is properly unnerved by the robbery and murder that mars the opening of her exhibition, and she's quick to see the connection with a previous heist at the museum. This is a tricky mystery, diligently plotted and layered with enough factual detail on museum theft and the illegal international traffic in beautiful objects to satisfy readers who are in it for more than the romance.
— New York Times Book Review — October 8, 2006
© 2006 New York Times