Sometimes genealogists take themselves and their quest a bit too seriously. Fiona Mountain's Pale as the Dead may be a cure for that. It is really a bit of fluff but what's not to like about a setting in the Cotwolds, a genealogist using the research techniques of almost twenty years ago to try to solve both a contemporary mystery and one about a classical painting? Try it, you might like it; I certainly did.

This is an unusual mix of genealogy mystery and history, centred on the glamorous Pre-Raphaelite artists and Lizzie Siddal, the girl in the famous ‘Ophelia’ painting. Ancestry detective Natasha Blake meets a mysterious, beautiful young woman, Bethany, who is re-enacting the Lizzie Siddal scene for a photographer. Bethany confides in Natasha her fear that her family is cursed following the deaths of her sister and mother. After asking Natasha to research her family tree, Bethany goes missing. Has she run from a failing love affair, committed suicide, or has she been murdered?
The trail is cold. Natasha must turn detective in two senses: she searches the birth, marriage and death records, census returns and wills, to find Natasha’s ancestors; at the same time, she is being followed by someone driving a red Celica. Adam, the photographer, is also Bethany’s boyfriend but Natasha feels there is more to his story than he is telling.
The narrative wandered rather from the central story, complicated unnecessarily by Natasha’s own history and love life which added little. Perhaps this could have been avoided by telling part of the story from Lizzie Siddal’s point of view. There were so many peripheral characters, both in the present time and the historical story, that at times I lost my way. I was also unconvinced by the threat to Natasha - the red car, the break-in. These jarred, almost as if added as an afterthought to appeal to lovers of crime fiction which I think was unnecessary. The kernel of the story about Bethany and Lizzie is fascinating in its own right.
‘Pale as the Dead’ is the first of two Natasha Blake novels.
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Story of how the disappearance of a young girl appears to be linked in some way to Lizzie Siddal, the model for a famous Rossetti painting. The detective is Natasha Blake, a complex young genealogist whose career choice is partly driven by her own life's mystery - she was abandoned as an infant. ( )

This is Fiona Mountain's first genealogical mystery with Natasha Blake as the genealogist/detective.It is one of the more realistic genealogy detective stories that I have read and Natasha herself has a good back story - kind of ironic that she is adopted but became a genealogist.

The book is set in England which is a plus for me because I can picture many of the places that Natasha goes to do her research as I have been there doing my own ancestor hunting. It also brings in historical figures as in the background of the person whose ancestors are being researched. Because the book was written in 2002 it is a bit of history in itself as it reminded me of how the research technology was 12 years ago. Genealogy research has come along way since the days of looking at the census on microfilm!

A good read and a realistic genealogy mystery and, even better, I have the next book in the series waiting for me on the shelf.

I read two books by Fiona Mountain in quick succession, Pale As The Dead and Bloodline. My original review on DorothyL covered both books so to get at least a little caught up I'm just copying parts of it.
Natasha Blake, the protagonist, is a bit of an odd duck. She loves her
work as a genealogist, but hasn't been able to learn much of her own
parentage - she was a foundling, adopted in infancy, who didn't learn
of the adoption until she was a teenager. Natasha dresses in vintage
clothes and lives in a cottage in the Cotswolds with a red setter dog.
As the first book opens her latest boyfriend has left, or rather, been
driven away. Now, I confess I'm a sucker for books about people who
have cottages in the Cotswolds, so right away I was hooked.

There are plenty of mysteries to be solved in genealogy, but in a
detective story there should be a modern-day crime or at least the
possibility of one connected with the ancestor hunt. That's what
Natasha encounters in these two books. I enjoyed PALE AS THE DEAD,
which deals with the pre-Raphaelites and Virginia Siddall, artist and
muse of D. G. Rossetti, positing a surprising sort of crime in the
past; but I felt Ms. Mountain really hit her stride with BLOODLINE.
I'd recommend both books for lovers of genealogy, amateur women
detectives, and the Cotswolds.
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