Still Life, Still Dead

Alex and her merry band of artists at the Creative Workshop are gearing up for their first artist retreat, with special guest artist Niko coming from New York. She has prepared for every eventuality to make sure the week is a success, except for finding Niko dead at the bottom of the cliff at Flat Rock Falls State Park. In one brush stroke, she sees that everything she’s worked for could crumble like a misshapen pot on the pottery wheel.

This could seriously impact The Creative Workshop, so Alex, hyped up on caffeine and chocolate, dives in to assist Jack in the investigation. Working on a murder case is new territory, though, and she grapples with the reality that the murderer could be someone she knows.

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 he was an unapologetic womanizer. 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 one using an alias 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.

Her zeal to uncover the murderer emboldens her, and she pushes to get some answers. When she is threatened and drugged, Jack knows she’s hit a nerve. Not to be deterred, Alex insists on finding the answers, and it is only with her help that they uncover evidence that points to a cunning plot to deceive that resulted in murder.