IN MANSIONS OF THE DEAD, the follow-up to Sarah Stewart Taylor's debut O' Artful Death, art history Professor Sweeney St. George investigates the murder of one of her students. Sweeney is asked by police to consult about the death of one of her students, one who perhaps enjoyed her class a bit too much: Brad Putnam is found suffocated in his dorm room, his dead body adorned with nineteenth-century mourning jewelry. The situation is even stickier because he's one of "the" Putnams, a famous and prestigious family—one of the earliest colonial families—and a family whose history is as much gossip and scandal as it is politics and wealth. Set in the Boston-area and the Newport, R.I. playgrounds of the rich and famous, Mansions of the Dead finds Sweeney exploring the secrets of Victorian Boston, the troubled history of a family with everything to lose, and the rocky terrain of her own heart.