Still Lives

A Los Angeles museum opens a show by an artist who paints herself as famous murdered women, and on the night of the gala the artist herself disappears. The narrator, an underpaid museum editor with her own complicated history with the missing woman, starts asking questions. Hummel worked in museums and it shows: the novel is as interested in the economics and vanity of the art world as in the mystery, and pointed about the appetite for dead women as subject matter.