O' ARTFUL DEATH

Freelance journalist Taylor makes a promising, if flawed, debut with an academic cozy set in rural Vermont's Byzantium, a bygone artists colony replete with a Victorian mansion, rumors of murder plots past and present and a surfeit of oddballs marooned there for the winter. Harvard art professor Sweeney St. George, invited to spend Christmas at the colony, soon finds herself immersed in a prolonged quest to find the origin of a distinctive monument in Byzantium's cemetery. Excerpts from a history of the colony help shed light on the fate of Mary Elizabeth Denholm, a farm girl employed as a maid and later as a model by the colony's rapacious founder. Sweeney's almost obsessive curiosity about poor Mary, who drowned at 18 in 1890, and the sculptor of her marble tomb becomes so intense that she (and likewise the reader) admits to being "ready for a break from Mary's gravestone." The story picks up with the unexpected slayings of locals linked to the scandal-ridden Mary, though it remains hampered by too many underdeveloped characters, notably one who proves to be the key to the ultimate resolution of Byzantium's present-day miseries. Taylor, however, does use her expert knowledge of 19th-century artwork and New England to good effect, and one can hope her plots will improve with experience. (June 2)