Posed for Murder - Hardcover

Cole, Meredith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312378564 ISBN 13: 9780312378561

Publisher: Minotaur Books, 2009

Synopsis

Lydia McKenzie is an artist whose medium is the camera. She’s having her first one-woman show. It is a series that ties to actual murders committed in the city’s past. Her method is to find a model—someone who can match in a general way the actual female victim—and pose her in the clothes and position in which the actual victim was found. The night of her showing, however, is disappointing; the owner of the gallery makes her pay for the invitations down to the stamps, hang the whole show herself, and rush for the usual wine and snacks. But what happens next is much worse: two plainclothes policemen shut down the event and take Lydia in for questioning. A young woman whom she knew well, and who was the model in one of her photographs, has been murdered. Worried that the police aren’t doing what they should, Lydia and another friend set out to find the killer.

The winner of the celebrated St. Martin’s Minotaur/Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition, Posed for Murder presents a snapshot of crime in a lasting and memorable story.

About this title

About the Author

Meredith Cole directed feature films and wrote screenplays, winning a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant in Screenwriting, before writing mysteries. She won the Minotaur Books/Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition in 2007.  She is a member of the board of the Mystery Writers of America/NY Chapter, and currently lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with her husband and son. 

Reviews

Cole's entertaining debut, winner of Minotaur and Malice Domestic's Best First Traditional Mystery competition, introduces fine art photographer Lydia McKenzie. Before the cheap wine is gone, the police arrive at Lydia's first New York solo exhibit, a collection of meticulously reconstructed homicide scenes, to inform her that one of her models, a good friend, has been killed and posed in the same manner as one of Lydia's photos. After another of her models suffers the same fate, attractive NYPD Det. Daniel Romero warns that Lydia may be next. Lydia begins to investigate, albeit in amateur fashion. Several members of her artist critique group make promising suspects, one of whom is arrested, but too late Lydia realizes she and the NYPD may be mistaken. She soon has cause to be grateful for her newly acquired self-defense techniques, learned at her best friend's insistence. Contemporary Manhattan, viewed through a struggling artist's eyes, lends social and cultural interest. (Feb.)
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Life imitates art with dire consequences in this provocative first novel. Intrigued by a book about past murders in her Brooklyn neighborhood, photographer Lydia McKenzie enlists friends to pose like the bodies pictured in the book while she shoots the scenes. So it’s not surprising that the first gallery show of her black-and-white deathlike photos is interrupted by detectives investigating the actual murder of one of Lydia’s model friends, her body found displayed just as she was photographed. While Lydia and best friend Georgia—both models for photographs themselves—seek out the murderer, another model’s body is found posed in the same fashion, Lydia is threatened when her apartment is ransacked, and a third model disappears. The pool of suspects is small, since the first murder required inside knowledge of Lydia’s work, and Cole provides a red herring before revealing the actual killer. This won the St. Martin’s Minotaur/Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition, and while its intriguing premise will attract readers, its pedestrian prose and the too-predictable unraveling of the plot lessen the book’s impact. --Michele Leber

Edition details

• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312378564
• ISBN 13: 9780312378561
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256