One of the biggest great surprises I get as a reviewer is when inter library loans from different libraries by different authors have strong similarities and arrive close enough in time for me to detect those similarities. This is certainly true for Cynthia Murphy's Paint Me Like Your Dead Girls and Aleema Omotoni's Winners & Liars. Both are set across the pond. Both books incorporate educational institutions and art. Both, while built around highly suspenseful plots, have more of an aura of sophistication than most YA fiction.
Paint Me Like Your Dead Girls begins with a quote--"If you want to understand the artist, you have to look at the painting."--and fleshes it out in the darkest way possible.
"I didn't sign up for this.
I trail behind Dad and Kim (who I flat out refuse to call my stepmom, especially when they've been married for less than forty-eight hours) and slow down as much as possible, while keeping them in sight."
When we meet Fliss, Murphy's narrator, she's not a happy camper. And her mood is about to go downhill. Accompanying the newlyweds to an estate sale, she spots a truly unsettling portrait, "so disfigured it barely looks human". Much to her dismay her father buys it.
"A lost piece of art so fabled that no one was sure it even existed. I had to buy it for the gallery before someone else got their hands on it."
The painting is part of a set of five, the other four already owned by the gallery. It's supposed to be a self portrait. The others are of women who were discovered dead early in the twentieth century. There are theories that the artist immortalized them after killing them.
After a reception where the newly rediscovered painting is shown a young female caterer is found grotesquely slain. Not long afterward a teenage girl meets the same fate. Some people think the painting is cursed. But Fliss, who aspires to become a crime journalist, suspects a copycat killer. If she's right she must discover their identity before they find their next victims...
...without becoming one of them.
Aleema Omotoni's Winners & Liars segues between a recent past and present, the then nicely contextualizating the now, introducing back story unobtrusively.
"Every year, our headmistress invited several Oxbridge alumni to mentor promising Year Twelve students through the almost year-long process for admittance at Oxford or Cambridge. Professor Darnley was always invited to prepare the English and History Oxbridge hopefuls--and he'd been doing it for decades."
In the past segments you get to meet Derin, Omotoni's protagonist, and learn about her relationships with the four other promising students, their brilliant but slightly eccentric mentor, and his famous author wife, Cornelia.
A year later a lot has changed. Three of the Kenfield Set have met their uni admissions goals. Sadly both Professor Darnley and Cornelia are dead. In fact the Kenfield Set, their peers from another school, and the professor's family have gathered at his really posh estate for the reading of the will...
...which comes as a shock to just about everyone. Rather than going to nearest of kin, the estate and all its assets will be the prize in a series of challenges the students from both schools are eligible for, the winner--the last student not being eliminated--getting all. With such high stakes the competition may not be completely ethical. The family, who will also be staying at the estate, is not going to just accept their loss. Goodness only knows what they're plotting in their desperation to regain the inheritance...
...and Cornelia's death might not have been an accident.
Fans of twisty YA mysteries with an added touch of sophistication will really relish either or both of these fine narratives.
On a purrrsonal note, Tuesday and Wednesday have been really busy for me. Tuesday precious Tobago had her yearly checkup. It is not easy to wrangle a 11 pound cat who is totally opposed to the plan into a cat carrier and tote her walking to the vet practice. She's in perfect health. Yay!!! When we got home I only had time to reward her for being good with a Fancy Feast entree before I had to take off for Orono. In the children's garden the kids were making woven wall hangings. It looked like so much fun I managed to take pictures and create one. (Picture tomorrow). Then I was harvesting in the community garden. I took so many good veggies home. Today I saw my urologist who says I'm doing great. Then I bussed to UMaine where I tabled for Black Bear Mutual Aid Fund. I was wearing a special outfit I'd copied from a picture in a book with my clothes. (Picture tomorrow). I got so many compliments!!! I'm going to wear dresses and skirts as long as I can because they don't work for bus commuting during Maine's too long winters.
A great big shout out goes out to all who participated and my awesome urologist, Dr. Laura Leddy.
Jules Hathaway
Sent from my Galaxy
