It’s been said my mind tends to wander — from scholarly consideration of 19th century female folklorists to miracles taking place in the urban church front that caught my imagination on my morning bus ride to teach at Fordham University. Okay, guilty as charged.
No-one dies in this mystery novel. Instead, medievalist Clare Malley is asked to discover why a teenager did not die in a drug-related shoot-out in an inner-city church. Is it a miracle performed by a mysterious turn-of-the-century priest named Father Enoch? Or is there a more sinister, but completely material, explanation?
When she heads to Woodstock to ghost-write a memoir for Bliss Falco, a name-dropping psychic who claims to have slept with everyone from Casanova to Hubert Humphrey in her past lives, failed romance writer Laura Converse never expects to be mistaken for a long-vanished singer. But she quickly finds herself trying to convince everyone in this New Age Mecca that she has not been sent by supernatural forces in order to solve a twenty-five-year-old murder. Making matters worse, the story immediately proves irresistible to her ex-husband, Rimes, a tabloid reporter – especially if Laura will grant him an exclusive. But tabloid fantasy turns quickly to Woodstock reality when a sleepwalking record producer discovers the singer’s remains and turns to Bliss to help him recover his memories about the long ago night the singer vanished. When murder – perhaps by supernatural means – results, Laura is forced to join forces with her ex-husband to investigate – a task considerably complicated by a distractingly attractive gardener, who just might be a warlock… or a murderer… or the love of Laura’s life.
The Wunderkammer of Lady Charlotte Guest examines the life of a truly extraordinary Victorian woman, Lady Charlotte Guest Schreiber. Lady Charlotte learned Welsh in order to provide the first complete tranlsation of the Mabinogion; ran her late husband’s iron mill until her eldest son attained his majority; then married a man fourteen years her junior and enjoyed a distinguished career as a collector of porcelain, playing cards, and fans. Although Lady Charlotte’s biography is fascinating in its own right, the scholarly emphasis of this book centers on how the impulse to collect informed her translations and her journals, as well as her later catalogues. Using the theories of Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Mieke Bol, Susan Miller, and Susan Pierce, this book examines how collection allowed Lady Charlotte to create a series of private signifying systems that often countered the prevailing Victorian discourse assigned to women.