Sarah Stewart Taylor Judgment of the Grave

Judgment of the Grave

Sarah Stewart Taylor

St. Martin's, Jul 2005, $24.95

ISBN: 0312337396

Harvard University Professor Sweeney St. George studies funerary art to include historical gravestones. Currently she is in Concord seeking clues to a Revolutionary War gravestone maker who specialized in unique rounded stones. At a cemetery, she meets twelve years old Pres Whiting, who is bald from chemotherapy. Pres tells her that his family has a grave stone carving business and has had one so since the late eighteenth century.

When Pres struggles to go home, a concerned Sweeney follows him to make sure he is okay. Pres stops when a dog seems overly excited. He follows the canine to see what is going on when he finds the corpse of a man wearing a Revolutionary War reenactment uniform that includes a hole in his stomach. Pres shows Sweeney whose friend Cambridge Detective Tim Quinn investigates the homicide. Sweeney and Pres help him, but concentrate more on the disappearance of a minuteman in 1775.

In her third appearance, the heroine provides an interesting look at graveyard art while in the background Sweeney and Quinn try to resolve two mysteries. Pres is a fabulous preadolescence whose health brings a pale over the who-done-it as the audience and Sweeney pray for a miracle, but doubt one will happen so they settle for Scherezade. As with MANSIONS OF THE DEAD and O'ARTFUL DEATH, Sarah Stewart Taylor provides characters that readers care what happens to them; in this case especially Pres, Sweeney and the General.

Harriet Klausner