Maggie, who has been touched by death before, is both appalled and fascinated by Lord’s paintings and despite her protestations that “there’s no path for someone ordinary like me to find one missing woman in this whole city”, she proves an able investigator into the passions and jealousies that drive life at the museum. “Did she believe nothing could happen to her, she who had spent years immersed in the accounts of killers who lurked in alleys and parks, in innocuous apartments, and in the very homes and beds of the women they murdered?” “Did she think she was safe, she who posed as, and then expressively painted, the Black Dahlia in her final position?” asks Maggie, Hummel’s narrator. Like the art depicted in its pages, Maria Hummel’s Still Lives (Quercus, £13.99) is vivid, vibrant and thrilling. When Kim doesn’t show up for the opening night, suspicion falls on Greg and Maggie is drawn into a quest to prove his innocence – or not. Maggie Richter, who works at the museum, is trying to avoid the hype – Kim is now going out with Richter’s ex-boyfriend Greg, the man she moved to LA with and whom she expected to marry. A contemporary art museum in LA is preparing for its new exhibition, the controversial Still Lives, a collection of Kim Lord’s self-portraits, in which the artist is impersonating murdered women, frozen in the final moments of their lives.
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