Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

Meet art historian Vicky Bliss, She is as beautiful as she is brainy--with unassailable courage, insatiable curiosity, and an expertise in lost museum treasures that often leads her into the most dangerous of situations. A missing masterwork in wood, the last creation of a master carver who died in the violent tumult of the sixteenth century, may be hidden in a medieval German castle in the town of Rothenburg. The prize has called to Vicky Bliss,...

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words. But the photograph art historian Vicky Bliss has just received gives rise to a thousand questions instead. A quick glance at the bloodstained envelope is all the proof she needs that something is horribly wrong. The picture itself is familiar: a woman adorned in the gold of Troy. Yet this isn't the famous photograph of Frau Schliemann-no, this picture is contemporary. The gold, as Vicky and her fellow academics...

"1985. Anita de Monte, a rising star in the art world, is found dead in New York City; her tragic death is the talk of the town. Until it isn't. By 1998 Anita's name has been all but forgotten— certainly by the time Raquel, a third-year art history student is preparing her final thesis. On College Hill, surrounded by privileged students whose futures are already paved out for them, Raquel feels like an outsider. Students of color, like her, are...

"Two women -- a century apart -- embark on a journey to healing, faith, forgiveness, and romance. In 2012, art historian Gwen Morris travels to England's Lake District to appraise the paintings and antiques of an old family friend, hoping to prove herself to her prestigious grandfather. While at Longdale Manor, she meets David Bradford -- the owner's handsome grandson -- who is desperate to save the crumbling estate by turning it into a luxury hotel....

"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...

Set partly in London and partly in South Carolina, Girl from the South follows the fortunes of a small group of the young and the single, the children, in fact, of sixties swingers. They have, it seems, infinite opportunity, but are bedeviled by indecision, by the breadth of choice, by the inflexibility of tradition and by the consequences of their parents' careless marital history.

Sweeney St. George looks nothing like a university Professor with her unruly red curls and preference for vintage clothing. Single and wary of relationships, she pours her energy into her college teaching and a passionate interest in cemetery art. And now Sweeney is intrigued with a macabre graveyard statue of a beautiful woman.

"This is what we long for: the profound pleasure of being swept into vivid new worlds, worlds peopled by characters so intriguing and real that we can't shake them, even long after the reading's done. In his earlier, award-winning novels, Dominic Smith demonstrated a gift for coaxing the past to life. Now, in The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, he deftly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape...

In The Girl From Oto, a young American scholar navigates a foreign world, experiencing friendship, betrayal and love as she chases the ghost of a Renaissance-era artist through Europe. American art historian Zari Durrell scores a coveted post-doctorate position in Scotland, studying artist Cornelia van der Zee. As Zari decodes clues hidden in two sixteenth-century portraits attributed to Van der Zee, she unearths the traces of a mysterious artist...