Books: Art's Blood
I lost my library card a week or so ago and while I was in my local branch, getting a new one, I picked up this book because I love mysteries and I love art, and thought the combination might be intriguing.
The city of Asheville, NC, I gather from the setting of this book, has become a sort of art colony or refuge for artists who either want to escape, or can't afford, places like New York or LA. Elizabeth Goodweather lives on a nearby farm where she raises herbs for Asheville restaurants and high-end supermarkets. One of her daughters lives out of state, the other, Laurel, is an artist and lives in a small apartment in Asheville, with a studio in some rehabilitated building in the formerly industrial area of Asheville. Renting the house across the road from Elizabeth are three young people, artists, who style themselves as "The 3." They work together on performance and interactive pieces.
At the presentation of one of their interactive pieces, the artists appear to have a planned "falling out", which will be filmed and become part of their exhibit at a nearby gallery. But several days later, one of the three is found dead in a junk car scheduled to be crushed as part of another artwork and the other male in the trio is arrested for his murder. The sole female in the group turns to Elizabeth and her family and friends to find out who the real killer is, and protect her from suffering the same fate.
Elizabeth Goodweather, as a character, is true to a long line of hopelessly curious people (usually middle-aged women) who always manage to be in the wrong place at the right time, and finds herself in a position take advantage of her acquaintance with former police officers, family contacts and the internet to investigate and solve the crime.
Elizabeth Goodweather is a likeable character, and her semi-rural lifestyle as an herb farmer and small businesswoman ring true to my admittedly limited ear for such things. Descriptions of her planting and cutting of herbs, the smells and homely chores of caring for the earth and gardens, were delightful, both soothing and interesting to someone who uses herbs a great deal in cooking.
It is the character of the artists and art where I felt rather let down by the book. It's as if a person who really didn't know any artists personally, but had seen them around -- especially the more outrageous ones -- decided to write about them, as an objective observer. There's no real "character" to any of them. Every single artist that Elizabeth comes in contact with, including her daughter, are of the provocative, self-absorbed, shallow and rebellious type. They all do strange, large, non-representational pieces, like the guy who casts horoscopes for abandoned and wrecked cars and then takes photos of them being crushed at precisely the right moment, according to their star charts. Or the perfectly straight male artist who dresses like a woman and behaves outrageously because art by "transvestites" sells.
Now, I'm not saying there aren't such artists around. I live in New York and I see such things every day. But the rather simplistic presentation of the art and artists really made me wonder why did the author bother to set the mystery in such a setting, with such characters? If all she needed was a frame or outline to hang a mystery on, she could just as easily have made them street sweepers or legal secretaries, except for using art as the setting to have the car crushed. Elizabeth's dogs have more personality and variety than the artists whose characters were barely "sketched" in.
This is the second book in the Elizabeth Goodweather series, which now number four. It was pleasant enough but I don't think I'll be seeking out the others. Although a fairly well-written mystery, the book disappointed me. It may be only because I've read so many mysteries that I had it pretty much figured out about 1/3 of the way through and was certain I had solved it by half way through. Perhaps I just want too much. I also felt there were a lot of incidents, characters and situations thrown in that were not really germaine to the mystery and didn't actually move the plot along all that much.
I also think it's pretty clear that Vicki Lane, the author, is a fan of Sharyn McCrumb's absolutely brillliant Appalachian series and hopes to develop a similar franchise of her own. But she lacks McCrumb's dark edge, clean prose, and insight into how history and geography build characters that may lead to murder. If you want to read a really good American series, full of really chilling situations and some complex, multi-layered characters, I highly recommend McCrumb. If you don't want to strain your brain too much, and if all you want are some pleasant hours solving not very bloody or difficult mysteries, I guess you could do worse than Vicki Lane.
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