Newcomer Sarah Stewart Taylor delivers a compelling and atmospheric cozy mystery that introduces Sweeney St. George, an art historian in Boston with a special interest in the art of death. Sweeney becomes interested in Byzantium, Vermont, an art colony that flourished in the late nineteenth century, when she comes upon a photograph of the striking gravestone of a girl who drowned, and may have been murdered, in 1890. The stone is in a tiny cemetery surrounded by other beautiful, if unremarkable, headstones, some dating back hundreds of years. But the unsigned sculpture that marks this young woman’s grave is of extremely high quality and the artist is unrecognizable. Sweeney is soon hooked, not only on the mystery of who created the beautiful sculpture but also on the details of the events surrounding the girl’s death. When the friend who showed her the gravestone invites Sweeney to visit his relatives in Byzantium for Christmas, she jumps at the chance, knowing full well that the girl’s murder has achieved the status of mythology in the town and hoping she’ll be able to uncover new information. But by the time they arrive, her interest in the girl and the sculpture has gotten around town and, in fact, seems to have disturbed a killer. For not long after Sweeney arrives, one of the girl's descendants is murdered, shot and left lying in the cemetery. Taylor has written a remarkably accomplished debut mystery in the traditional cozy vein, and she's sure to win over legions of fans with O’ Artful Death.

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.

GRAVESTONE EXPERT SWEENEY ST. GEORGE'S latest adventure finds her in historic Concord, Massachusetts, investigating a confusing and grisly murder. When the body of an unidentified man dressed in the uniform of an 18th century British soldier is found in the Concord woods, Sweeney can't help but want to know more. Soon, with the help of a young boy who has secrets of his own, she's looking into the 230-year-old disappearance of a local stonecutter who was one of Concord's famous Minutemen. But when her sleuthing collides with Cambridge homicide detective Tim Quinn's own investigation into a more recent disappearance, Sweeney has to face the fact that Concord's historic past may not be laid to rest and that secrets forged during the founding of a nation can come back to haunt the present in terrifying ways.

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. According to Publishers Weekly, "The fourth mystery to feature art historian Sweeney St. George is every bit as riveting as the previous installments in Taylor's series."