Still Lives

The glittering world of art can be at once insightful and nasty. Set in L. A at a prestigious gallery that is having money problems, a new show featuring the avant garde, often shocking Kim Lord. Her latest installations are paintings of women who were mudered in Los Angeles, including Nicole zBrown Simpson and the Black Dahlia. Lord uses her own face and body but the manner of death is prominently and sometimes graphically displayed. Maggie, a copy editor and proof reader for the museum, has roots in journalism, which is her first love. At the opening gala, Kim Lord makes headlines when she doesn't show up for her own show.

This is a tightly plotted, literary mystery. What happened to Kim? Clues are scarce, the timeline of her show more disappearance, suspect but Maggie is determined to get to the bottom of this crime. She has a vested interest in the outcome. In her journey we see the parts of Los Angeles that is far from glam. We also see how violence to women titillates and sells. We see the underside of the art world, from collectors who manipulate the market to scammers who are out for a quick buck.

There is a full, well rounded supporting cast and plenty of interpersonal drama. It all balances out nicely though, didn't guess the finale until Maggie herself makes the connection. This is a well done, well thought out story and is so much more than just a thriller.

ARC from Counterpoint. show less

4.5 stars

Still Lives is a fascinating read set in Los Angeles that focuses on the disappearance of an up-and-coming artist right before the opening night of her exhibition. The book is significantly darker and more grim than I usually tolerate, but the originality of the plot and the subject matter kept me reading at a furious pace to find what was going to happen next.

Maggie Richter works as an editor at the Rocque Museum and has mixed feelings about Kim Lord’s exhibition, self-portraits of Lord dressed up as famous, murdered women including Nicole Brown Simpson, the Black Dahlia, and numerous others. On a professional level, Maggie is uncomfortable with the subject matter and the fact that the art work itself has drawn a lot of show more criticism; on a personal level, Kim Lord currently dates Maggie’s ex-boyfriend Greg who Maggie still misses. While the subject matter of the book is dark, Hummel’s deft and careful handling of the graphic elements of the story lessened the gruesomeness and allowed me to focus on Kim’s disappearance and the craziness of the modern art world.

I highly recommend Still Lives. I finished it weeks ago and am still contemplating aspects of the story. To me that is a sign of a fabulous book. show less

Self indulgent.

That's really the best way I can describe this book. The writing is good, and the idea behind the story is intriguing, but it meanders, slows, goes around in circles, and then meanders again, and it's at least 50 pages too long (even though it only comes in at a whopping 277 pages at full length as it is).

I was hoping for a much bigger revelation at the end. At one point I was holding my breath, certain there would be a pay-off for the time I'd invested in the story. Some monumental discovery. A conspiracy involving a number of people. A betrayal or major shock or something... but none of it came to pass. The reveal, when it happened, was weak and seemed to hit the main character out of nowhere. And once she came up with show more a solid suspect, the story unfolded like a paint-by-numbers work, leading to the inevitable conclusion with the requisite confrontation scene and bloodshed.

I enjoyed the writing, and I was happy enough to flip the pages and see how the story would unfold, I was just very disappointed that the story was... well, that the story was THE story. No surprises, no twists, no intriguing revelations.

The best part, by far, is the author's exploration of a world that views female murder victims as a spectacle; just another salacious bit of entertainment to sell magazines and newspapers and get people to tune in to the evening news. I appreciated taking a deeper look at how we all (myself included) absorb these types of stories, and how women are portrayed in the media overall. But I still wanted more from a mystery novel. show less

Los Angeles was the lure to read this book for me. I lived a bus ride away in the 1980 and 1990s, so I wanted the atmosphere. I got that and also a very hard to put down mystery too. I have been reading it all day and have just finished it.

Maggie Richter is working a modern art museum in down town Los Angeles like the author and that gives authenticity to her description of the city's art scene and what it was like to work there. She had not prepared for this career but landed in it because of her love of art and the city, Previously, something had happened in her past that she kept hidden and felt guilty about.

When the story starts, everyone at the museum is gearing up for a new controversial exhibit. Kim Lord, the artist had been show more working a theme. She dressed herself, as famous women who had been murdered like Nicole Simpson Brown, the Black Dahlia and others. Even though she put years into painting the portraits of the murdered women, she did not want to sell them. She was making a statement about the use of the women as prey for society for entertainment. But when the show opens, she does not show up for the debut.

When Maggie's boyfriend from the past also the current lover of Kim Lord is the main suspect is arrested, Maggie is sure that he could never murder any one and the hunt for the killer starts.

Although, the story started out slowly, it was actually building in complexity and before long, it had me in its grip!.

I received an advanced reading copy of this book from the Publisher as a win from FirstReads but that in no way made a difference in my thoughts or feelings in this review. show less

This book will appeal to readers that enjoy a significant amount of descriptive writing in a novel, in a film, all of the “description” is done for you by a camera and sound. An interesting mystery wrapped in oodles of internal dialogue, local color and characters, even the odd sunset horseback ride. I like my reads more straightforward and found much of this novel to be extraneous fluff. But the writing is good, the mystery is sufficient and the setting unique.

Quite literally the day after I posted a mini-review of Still Lives on Instagram, Reese Witherspoon picked it for her August book club pick. I guess Reese and I have slightly different taste. I’ve said it before but thrillers, unless they raise questions like those in The Blinds, aren’t really my thing. I pick them up when I’m in a rut because they’re easy and fast but I never love them or feel it necessary to own my own copy once I’m done. I was having trouble picking a book and needed something that didn’t make me think, since work was requiring all my extraneous brain cells–so Still Lives happened.

Artist Kim Lord goes missing on the night of the opening of her show, “Still Lives,” an exploration of the glorification show more and commodification of female murder victims–their bodies are taken by their killers and yet the violations continue as we repeatedly gaze at and speculate about their murders. Lord dresses up as each of the victims in their infamous death scenes or poses, photographs it, then paints from the photographs. The result is pictures that look like the victims until you look closely and can see that each victim could be someone else (in this instance, Lord). Maggie, ex-girlfriend to Lord’s boyfriend and employee of the museum hosting the exhibition, finds herself pulled into the investigation. At the end of the day, the whodonit was fine and Maggie was relatable protagonist, but the most interesting part of the book to me was simply the message being sent by the fake Kim Lord with her fictional paintings. If you like mysteries and the premise sounds interesting to you, this might be worth your time. It just wasn’t my thing. show less

I was going to give it four stars (enjoyed the depiction of LA and the art world) until the flimsy dénouement, which forced me to subtract two. A "feminist response to the thriller genre" should not have a deranged woman murdering another woman over a man!