STEPHANIE KANE DEBUT SERIES

To gin up excitement before the opening, the museum staff plans a series of tableaux vivants of selected paintings at venues around the city, but with a twist: The static scenes with actors will each transform into a short playlet in the spirit of the painting. Lily Sparks is back in this latest mystery installment, tracking down a killer inspired by Edward Hopper’s paintings.Įx-attorney Lily is the conservator of paintings at the Denver Art Museum, which is gearing up for a major Hopper exhibit. Sometimes, the audience will just have to take it on faith that she is on the right track.Ī whodunit that delivers an excellent gallery of characters and captivating historical tidbits. That said, readers will occasionally find it hard to follow the subtleties of Lily’s deductive breakthroughs. She became known as the “mother of forensic science.” As for the Cole, the audience learns why the depiction of houses would be anathema to the founder of the Hudson River School.

Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962) devoted her life to making miniature dioramas and for exactly the forensic purposes readers see in the story. The Castle Training bit, for example, is based on real history.

And she always gives readers a little something extra.

STEPHANIE KANE DEBUT HOW TO

The author knows how to keep things moving swiftly, and readers get a good picture of hip society in Denver. But this places her in danger of being killed herself. (Is there a theme here?) At any rate, as in Kane’s other volumes, Lily, her insights doubted if not ridiculed, tries to expose the murderer. And Lily and her lover, Paul Reilly, are desultorily house hunting. Lily discovers, with the aid of a scruffy genius named Raf Feldman, that the work is not a genuine Cole after all.

At the same time, Lily Sparks-an art conservator, former attorney, and the hero of this series-is trying to stabilize a Thomas Cole painting of a manor. But to everyone’s growing horror, genuine murders are occurring that seem to be inspired by these settings, including a man bludgeoned in his high-rise hot tub just as the Castles portrayed it in miniature. She writes the scripts: Were these really cases of murder or just unfortunate accidents? The cops have to put the visual clues together. He builds dioramas that resemble cutaway dollhouses where some little mannequins have met with bad ends.

In this third installment of a crime novel series, dioramas featuring miniature homicide scenes-which serve as teaching tools for cops-may be inspiring real murders.Īdam and Eve Castle-he’s an architect and she’s a psychologist-run Castle Training in Denver. She always knew Dad killed Mom.” While the author excels at pulling together a mountain of documents, her analyses-and many of her descriptions-leave much to be desired.Ī suspenseful read that asks more questions than the author is prepared to answer. She couldn’t believe I had doubts, he told me. “This was the first time he’d said he wanted to talk to one of his siblings about his mother’s death,” writes Kane. Almost 10 years after the murder, Doug spoke to a sister about the tragedy. In fact, she doesn’t describe Doug’s reaction to his mother’s murder until halfway through the book. She repeats information without elaborating on it, and she fails to examine the motivations, mindsets, and even basic reactions of her characters, none of whom are satisfyingly rendered-not even her ex-husband, Doug.

The short, stunted chapters certainly add to a quick-paced, suspenseful flow, but Kane’s writing is often so fractured and truncated that significant analysis eludes her. Kane’s stated intent is to examine how her own fictionalized account unwittingly played a role in these events. In this uneven narrative, she revisits the circumstances of the original crime, including witness statements, court papers, police reports, and her own conversations with family members. As a result of that book’s publication, the cold case was reopened, and Kane eventually had to testify. For the author, that meant writing a crime novel loosely based on the violent events, though by the time Quiet Time was published, she and Betty’s son had gotten divorced. While Betty’s husband, Duane, was investigated for the murder, he eventually walked free, leaving Kane-and the rest of Betty’s family-to reckon with the aftermath. One morning in 1973, Kane’s soon-to-be mother-in-law, Betty, was murdered. The crime that inspired a crime writer comes back to haunt her.

Stephanie kane debut