Lesson in Red

Early in Hummel’s overly earnest sequel to 2018’s Still Lives, budding journalist Maggie Richter returns to L.A., where her former employer, Janis Rocque, founder and chief donor of the Rocque Museum, has an assignment for her. A few months earlier, 22-year-old Brenae Brasil, a student at Los Angeles Art College and a rising star in the video-art world with “a talent for controversy,” fatally shot herself in her studio. Janis tells Maggie that “something systemic is wrong” with the school, and it led to Brenae’s suicide. Janis arranges for Maggie to go undercover at a gallery where an installation by the LAAC director, a conceptual artist, is being set up by four of his students. She’s to report her findings to a private eye. Rather than present a mystery with moral underpinnings, the author uses Maggie’s investigations to deliver a righteous message about vulnerable women and the commodification of contemporary art, and she tries too hard to connect everything with what happened in Still Lives. Those invested in Maggie from her first outing will best appreciate this follow-up. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary. (June)