Review

For fans of:  Lorna Barrett

Part of Nell Pratt's job as president of the Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society is to keep wealthy potential donors happy, so when developer Mitchell Wakeman requests the Society's help with a project, Nell quickly signs on. It seems Wakeman has big plans for an old dairy farm he recently purchased; before he breaks ground, though, he wants to make sure there’s nothing historically significant about the property that could derail things. A favorable report delivered in a timely fashion could mean a lot of money for the Society, so Nell vows to hit the ground running.

Unfortunately, before her staff can even get started with their research, local history buff George Bowen is found dead in a pond at the farm. Who killed the man, and why? And why was he trespassing on Wakeman’s property? If Bowen’s wife is to be believed, he was on the verge of a major discovery at the time of his death; was he murdered to keep his findings from seeing the light of day? Wakeman wants Nell to focus her attentions on the past, and she will, but if her digging also just so happens to help catch a modern-day killer, so much the better – right?

There’s a lot to like about this fifth installment in Sheila Connolly’s Museum Mystery series. Razing the Dead is a deliberately paced, intelligently plotted, character-driven tale that incorporates a ton of Pennsylvania history without subjecting the reader to a single info dump. The cast is full of mature, independent, well educated women, and the relationships they share – with each other, as well with the men in the cast – are realistic, nuanced, and add depth and texture to the story. Connolly’s dialogue rings true, and her prose has great flow. She does a marvelous job of tying her historical mystery to her present-day one; in fact, if anything, the story of what went down on the dairy farm 200-plus years ago is more compelling than the puzzle of who killed George Bowen. And that actually ties into my main complaint regarding Razing the Dead. While the mystery surrounding Bowen’s murder has great potential, Connolly fails to capitalize on her setup. She never successfully establishes the story’s stakes, the killer’s motive is suspect at best, and the denouement is so anti-climactic you could miss it if you blinked.  If she’d put as much effort into crafting her whodunit as she did the other aspects of her plot, this could have been a truly marvelous book; as it stands, though, Razing the Dead feels like it could use another draft.

Reviewed by Kat