Last Place (Tess Monaghan Series #7) » (Reissue)

Well known for her popular series of mysteries starring the fearless Tess Monoghan, Laura Lippman has won every major mystery award, from the Anthony to the Agatha.

Five brutal homicides ... zero arrests. Disgraced private investigator Tess Monaghan agrees to review the police murder files for blunders and finds a single common thread emerging with shocking clarity -- the link is Tess Monaghan herself.

Publishers Weekly

When Pope Julius II saw Michelangelo's Piet , he determined to have his grand tomb made by the artist. Summoned from Florence to Rome in 1508, Michelangelo found himself on the losing side of a competition between architects and the victim of a plot "to force a hopeless task" upon him-frescoing the vault of the Sistine Chapel. How the sculptor met this painterly challenge is the matter of this popular account, which demythologizes and dramatizes without hectoring or debasing. Forget cinematic images of Charlton Heston flat on his back-Michelangelo's "head tipped back, his body bent like a bow, his beard and paintbrush pointing to heaven, and his face spattered with paint" is excruciating enough to sustain the legend. King (Brunelleschi's Dome) re-creates Michelangelo's day-to-day world: the assistants who worked directly on the Sistine Chapel, the continuing rivalry with Raphael and the figures who had much to do with his world if not his art (da Vinci, Savonarola, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Martin Luther, Erasmus), including the steely Julius II. King makes the familiar fresh, reminding the reader of the "novelty" of Michelangelo's image of God and how "completely unheard of in previous depictions of the ancestors of Christ" was his use of women. Technical matters (making pigments, foreshortening) are lucidly handled. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.