Still Life, Still Dead

An Alex Montgomery Arts and Crafts Mystery

Alex and her team at The Creative Workshop have worked hard to ensure their first artist retreat, Palette and Pencil: The Art of Making Art, is a success. Alex thinks they’ve covered every eventuality until she finds renowned guest artist Niko dead at the bottom of the cliff at Flat Rock Falls State Park, where the class had been painting a few hours earlier. Murder had definitely not been part of the plan!

This could seriously impact The Creative Workshop, so Alex, hyped up on caffeine and chocolate, dives in to assist her cousin Jack in the investigation. Niko was by all accounts an unsavory character, and Alex and her cohorts unearth multiple motives for the murder; unscrupulous and possibly illegal business practices, jealousy within the cutthroat art world, and a reputation for unapologetic womanizing. The suspect list grows as Alex delves more deeply into the class. There’s the quiet but keen observer, the turbulent artiste, the bedazzled and jangly extrovert, the scorned lover, and the mysterious man who seems overly interested in Alex and The Workshop. After uncovering a link to her old life in Philadelphia, Alex starts to worry that this is more about her past than Niko’s. Working on a murder case is new territory, though, and she grapples with the reality that the murderer could be someone she knows.

In one brush stroke, she sees that everything she’s worked for could crumple like a misshapen pot on the pottery wheel, so she rolls up her sleeves and gets to work. But when she pushes the wrong person too far, it could be lights out for Alex.