Introducing my latest book: ‘Murder Brushed with Gold’

When I retired 15 years ago, I thought I’d try my hand at writing a mystery.  It took six months, and it taught me the difference between ‘thinking about doing something’ and actually doing it. That book, ‘A Murder in the Garden Club’ turned out to be very popular and, even better, gave me a cast of interesting and likeable characters whom I could incorporate into subsequent stories.

No suburban sprawl in Hardington

What I didn’t realize back then was one of my most important ‘characters’ was the book’s locale: Hardington, Massachusetts.  In other parts of the country, Hardington seems idyllic (except for all those murders): a small New England town, yet just a short commute to Boston. It’s a town without big-box stores or strip malls. It is surrounded by open space and has a near-four-century-long history. It’s the anthesis of the typical big-city suburb, where you know you’ve crossed municipal boundaries only because there’s another Home Depot.

Hardington and Medfield
are both southwest of Boston

Hardington is a lightly fictionalized version of the town my wife and I have called home (off and on) since 1980: Medfield, Massachusetts.  Medfield has just a handful of traffic lights and no streets wider than two lanes, yet it is just 17 miles from the center of Boston. It has about 13,000 residents scattered over 15 square miles. More than half the town’s land is off limits to development.

For ‘Murder Brushed with Gold’, I mined two nuggets of Medfield’s history.  First, for several years in the late 1800s, the town had a small artist’s colony focused on impressionist, plein air painting.  No less a figure than Isabella Stewart Gardner touted Medfield as having vistas comparable to Monet’s Giverny.  And, second, in 2006, AOL (then, a powerhouse internet service provider) tried to get permission from a judge to dig up a yard in Medfield. Why? Because the company believed a young internet spammer had buried millions of dollars of gold bars in his parents’ lawn. (There is some stuff you can’t make up.)

The roadside cottage still exists

I freely admit a soft spot for art.  It figures prominently in ‘Deadly Deeds’ and ‘A Murder at the Flower Show’. For my new book, I re-created that colony in the summer of 1889 and populated it with a mix of real and fictional artists. One of the real people is Dennis Miller Bunker, a gifted artist who died tragically young. One of his enduring paintings, which resides in the National Gallery of Art, is of a humble roadside cottage in Medfield.  I had a fictional artist, Alan Churchill Lawrence, paint a first version of it.

'The Pool, Medfield' by
Dennis Miller Bunker (1889)

Every good story needs a ‘heavy’, and mine is another fictional artist: Edward Merrill Cosgrove. He is already famous, powerful and wealthy with an oceanfront estate in Maine, yet he deigns to pay a visit to Hardington for reasons that become clear as the book progresses. 

After three days, though, two men appear at the boardinghouse’s door seeking an audience with Cosgrove. They do not get it. An agitated Cosgrove disappears for a day and, late that evening, Lawrence witnesses what he believes is the burial of the two men by Cosgrove and an accomplice behind the cottage Lawrence painted just a few days earlier.

'Gray Day on the Charles' by
John Leslie Breck (1889)

Lawrence knows Cosgrove is not a man to be crossed, yet he must be brought to justice. Lawrence adds a conspicuous spot of color to the painting and sends it off, along with pages from his journal, to his agent in Boston with instructions to find a way to get the material into the hands of the police.

Skip ahead 132 years. Liz Phillips (the amateur sleuth in the series) is accompanying her good friend, antiques dealer Roland Evans-Jones, to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts where, in exchange for having his painting cleaned, he is lending Alan Churchill Lawrence’s ‘Wayside Cottage’ for an upcoming MFA exhibition on New England plein air art colonies.  In MFA’s conservation studio and in the presence of the curator mounting the exhibit, the painting is taken out of its frame for the first time.  Out pops Lawrence’s journal, together with a plea by Lawrence to his art dealer for his help.

Isabella Stewart Gardner
as painted by Sargent

The curator immediately recognizes the journal as a powerful, historical artifact.  Cosgrove’s standing as the ‘Father of American Impressionism’ could be shaken to its foundation. She immediately sends PDFs of the journal to researchers for their comment.  Liz Phillips suggests digging up the site identified in the painting (the building still stands, little changed, from the time it was immortalized). Volunteers are recruited.  Detective John Flynn (the series’ other protagonist) gets involved to coordinate things. Hardington’s police chief even invites the media to record what is found.

Which, or course, is when all hell breaks loose. The heirs of Edward Merrill Cosgrove say the journal is a sensational forgery created by a publicity-seeking ‘used furniture dealer’. They demand the painting and journal be turned over to their experts for scrutiny.  And then, those volunteers at the wayside cottage sink their shovels down into the soil behind the wayside cottage… and strike something very unexpected.

Oh, and you’re only about a quarter way through the book.

How it all started

If you’ve not read the five ‘Hardington’ mysteries that precede this, you’ll find ‘Murder Brushed with Gold’ a satisfying stand-alone read with lots of humor, twists and turns; along with plot points turning on art, museum politics, robocalls, fractional jets, and some other things that would be spoilers to mention.

If you’ve kept up with the series, you’ll finally get Roland Evans-Jones’ back story, meet Liz’s daughter, Detective John Flynn’s wife, and get another helping of Felicity Snipes. And, for those who have been rooting for two lost souls to admit their attraction for one another… well, let’s say there’s some of that, too.

You can purchase print or Kindle copies of ‘Murder Brushed with Gold’ through Amazon, or print copies directly from the author at https://the-hardington-press.square.site/, or by contacting me directly. You can read the first chapters at www.TheHardingtonPress.com.