UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Pale As the Dead, by Fiona Mountain (2002)

             Fiona Mountain’s 2002 book, Pale as the Dead, is about Natasha Blake, an uncommon sort of detective whose trade is genealogy. She researches family trees for a living. The author is tapping into a huge interest group here: In England, genealogy is now the most popular hobby, and more websites treat genealogy than any other subject except pornography.

Natasha is approached by a young woman named Bethany, who claims to have ancestors connected with the nineteenth-century painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Bethany gives Natasha a diary given her by her grandmother. Then she disappears.

            Bethany’s boyfriend, a photographer who works in Oxford, hires Natasha to find Bethany. Natasha doesn’t trust the boyfriend, especially when he makes a pass at her, but she’s fascinated by the missing girl, who resembles Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife and model, Lizzie Siddal. Bethany seems to cultivate the resemblance, and Natasha worries that she may carry the imitation all the way to suicide, which was Lizzie’s end.

            Complicating her identification with the missing girl is the fact that Natasha doesn’t know her own background; she was adopted after being abandoned by her mother in a Sheffield hospital a few hours after Natasha’s birth on the day before Christmas Eve. So, Natasha is a genealogist ignorant of her own past--that ignorance, Natasha believes, a good part of the reason why she became a genealogist. Bethany is also ignorant of her past, though she thinks she knows her parents very well. What she doesn’t know about her own background may very well kill her.

            The book is set in Oxford and in the picturesque village of Snowshill in the Cotswolds, but some of it takes place in the London haunts of the Pre-Raphaelites and at Kelmscott, where William Morris lived. Mountain does a good job of tying together the past and the present throughout the book, as Natasha’s day takes her past carolers singing “In the Bleak Midwinter,” a carol written by Christina Rossetti, and into public records offices and genealogical archives next to museums exhibiting Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Meanwhile she is reading the diary Bethany gave her, written by the daughter of the Rossettis’ doctor. The diary takes her right into the past.         

            In Bethany’s past Natasha discovers a stunner—to use a word the Pre-Raphaelites liked. This book takes a unique approach to the mystery genre.