Books
Light on Bone

by Kathryn Lasky
Woodhall Press, September 2022, $27.95

This is the first in a series featuring Georgia O’Keeffe as the detective. That made me hesitate, but this was an intriguing and interesting read, and it gave me a new appreciation of O’Keeffe. I can only assume the author is a huge fan—I was before I read this book, but am now even more so after taking this well-imagined trip inside O’Keeffe’s creative brain, and (virtually) visiting the Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico, where she did the paintings that have made her an icon.

Georgia has come to the desert for clarity and to recover from a nervous breakdown of sorts after discovering that her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, cheated on her. Georgia appreciates the solitude, quiet, beauty, and light she finds there.

I ended up googling photos of her very minimalist home in the desert, where in Lasky’s book, the painter takes her early morning walks. The fictional O’Keeffe never leaves the house without her snake stick and beheads a rattler right off the bat, establishing her bad-assery (as if that were needed).

She’s out on an early morning painting expedition when she discovers the body of a priest. The law, in the form of the sheriff and a rare female coroner (it’s 1934) are summoned, and the mystery is underway.

As the investigation progresses, she becomes friendly with the sheriff and the two have a nicely balanced detecting style. I liked very much that detective Georgia ends up using her visual memory to solve the crime. While there are a number of corpses and the methods of death range from the unusual to the really unusual (in fact, one of my all-time favorite methods for murder happens toward the end of the novel), the mystery is not completely front and center. Light on Bone is a character study, and since the character is Georgia O’Keeffe, it’s very hard to look away.

There’s also an interesting depiction of some of the famous folks who visited the Ghost Ranch, including Charles and Anne Lindbergh just a year after the infamous kidnapping and murder of their child and Robert Wood Johnson (of Johnson & Johnson fame). Other historical touches include a secret radio network of spies tied to the Germans. Unraveling this network becomes part of the mystery.

The story, while set in 1934, anticipates World War II, and it’s a very different take from many other books set during the war in Europe. It gave me a different way into what was happening at the time through a nicely assembled mystery story with an absolutely fabulous woman at the center of it.

Robin Agnew
Teri Duerr
7541
Lasky
September 2022
light-on-bone
27.95
Woodhall Press