When I moved back to my small hometown of Apple Grove, I planned a return to the middle of my family as the youngest sibling with two older brothers in a place where I had enjoyed a nurturing childhood. I left the Chicago art scene as an abysmal failure, unable to paint because my heart hadn’t scarred over the emotional wounds of our parents dying in a senseless car accident with a drunk driver several years earlier. We still struggled to reconfigure a family without them at the top. I hoped my decision to move home would help that process.

My older brother Tom lured me back to become executive director of a new art center named for my world-class sculptor mother, The Adele Marsden Center for the Arts. While I remembered our town as heaven surrounded by corn and bean fields, my mother often reminded us we couldn’t live on corn and beans alone. Creativity and art would fill our souls.

My brothers. Tom is the Apple Grove police detective, known for his thoughtful detecting skills and determined to over-protect me. My other brother, Andy, and his partner, Lance, own a gift shop and play in a rock band at my best friend Angie’s bar. Tom’s ringtone on my phone is the theme from “Law and Order,” and Andy’s ringtone is “Welcome to the Jungle.” That pretty much sums up their differences. One is John Wayne, the other Looney Tunes.

At the same time, I inherited a board of directors, some of whom are not sure a thirty-year-old can handle this job, but they are willing to give me a try. Many of them remember me as a kid growing up here, so I work extra hard to make sure they see me as an adult. My nemesis, Ivan F. Truelove III, CPA, presides over my board, his pointy-shaped head, buggy eyes, and polka-dotted bowties a lurking presence over my shoulder. He sends me daily emails with all manner of micromanaging items, but recently he’s discovered texts, which are even more irritating. He currently seems obsessed with floors falling in. Daily, he reminds me we need nothing but good publicity. Save me.

My huge first exhibit is coming up, and I can’t afford any mistakes. Everything must go flawlessly. Prior to the exhibit date, my current task is to make the 19th century Lowry Building safe for the new art center patrons. I hired a company to come and lift the second floor of the building several inches and secure the first floor, all accomplished from new timber and a system of pulleys in the basement. The construction workers just started this morning with plenty of noise to accompany our workday. A few minutes ago, the noise from the basement fell silent, and the site manager called me down. I knew there was something weird about that space.

And therein lies the problem.

It’s what they found in the basement. . .

Death in a Pale Hue, An Art Center Mystery #1
Genre: Traditional
Release: June 2022
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Jill Madison, thirty-year-old artist, returns to her hometown in downstate Illinois to open an art center honoring her late mother, a world-renowned Jamaican sculptor. Jill had suffered from depression in Chicago and been unable to paint because of her grief over the untimely deaths of her parents, several years earlier. Now she struggles with self-confidence, especially since she is young and responsible to a conservative board of directors for her non-profit art center. Soon, the center loses a valuable sculpture in a burglary, and a terrible discovery awaits Jill in the basement when the construction workers begin renovating the building…not exactly an auspicious beginning to her career. How will she keep her job, run her first big event, and escape a killer who plans to paint her out of the picture permanently?

About the author
Susan Van Kirk a writer of cozy mysteries. She lives at the center of the universe—the Midwest—and writes during the ridiculously cold and icy winters. Why leave the house and break something? Van Kirk taught forty-four years in high school and college and raised three children. Miraculously, she has low blood pressure. She is the author of The Endurance Mysteries and A Death at Tippitt Pond. Currently, she is president of the Guppy Chapter of Sisters in Crime and also a member of Mystery Writers of America. Visit her website at susanvankirk.com.

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