Lottie-- under-sheriff and county historian-- is attending her niece's confirmation. The Reverend Mary Farnsworth flees to the anti-room after dropping the chalice during communion, and her body is later discovered. Lottie soon learns that the beloved Reverend Mary was a woman without a past-- and an investigation into old documents riles up murderous century-old rivalries.

When a former student turns up in David Mapstone's office, she seems to have the perfect case for this history-professor-turned-deputy: a letter left by her deceased father, confessing to a forty-year-old murder and providing directions to the body. But things are never what they seem in Phoenix, a fast-buck city of newcomers seeking fresh starts from sometimes dark pasts. Just ask David's wife, Deputy Lindsey Faith Mapstone. One morning the start...

"[A] dual-period narrative [which] ... blends a haunting supernatural thriller with the vivid history of Tudor London, a place where monks are being executed, Jews have been banished, and the power of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell reaches into every corner of the kingdom"--Dust jacket flap.

Eric is a newly minted historian just out of graduate school, plagued by self-doubt over both his past choices and his future options. With no clear direction, he follows his lover, Em, when she travels to the Yucatan for her scientific research, but ends up alone in this foreign place. And so he pursues his own private quest, tracing his family's history to a Mexican ghost town, where, a hundred years earlier, young Cornish miners-among them Eric's...

As gravestone expert Sweeney St. George tours burial sites of the Civil War, she stops to watch a battlefield reenactment in Massachusetts. There, she meets Pres Whiting, a boy whose family is in the gravestone business. When Pres discovers a dead man in a Revolutionary War-era British soldier's uniform, Sweeney and Cambridge homicide detective Tim Quinn jump on the case. While they search for clues regarding the dead body, Sweeney and Quinn investigate...

Art history professor Sweeney St. George is in the middle of putting together an exhibit on her specialty, "the art of death," for the university museum when she makes an unusual discovery: A valuable piece of Egyptian funerary jewelry that should be in the museum's collection seems to be missing. Searching for answers, Sweeney learns that a student intern at the museum was the last person to check out the piece, a young woman who died of an apparent...