ZRM03 - Rituals of the Dead

✍ Scribed by Alderson, Jennifer S

• Book ID: 110510658
• Publisher: Traveling Life Press
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 143 KB
• Series: Zelda Richardson Mystery 3
• Category: Fiction
• ASIN: B0795Z3HRX

✦ Synopsis

A museum researcher must solve a decades-old murder before she becomes the killer’s next victim in this riveting dual timeline thriller set in Papua and the Netherlands.

Agats, Dutch New Guinea (Papua), 1961 : While collecting Asmat artifacts for a New York museum, American anthropologist Nick Mayfield stumbles upon a smuggling ring organized by high-ranking members of the Dutch colonial government and the Catholic Church. Before he can alert the authorities, he vanishes in a mangrove swamp, never to be seen again.

Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 2018 : While preparing for an exhibition of Asmat artifacts in a Dutch ethnographic museum, researcher Zelda Richardson finds Nick Mayfield’s journal in a long-forgotten crate. Before Zelda can finish reading the journal, her housemate is brutally murdered and ‘Give back what is not yours’ is scrawled on their living room wall.

Someone wants ancient history to stay that way—and believes murder is the surest way to keep the past buried.

Can she solve a sixty-year-old mystery before decades of deceit, greed, and retribution cost Zelda her life?

• Awarded a B.R.A.G. Medallion by indieBRAG's readers in December 2018
• One of Amy's Bookshelf Reviews' Top 20 Books of 2018
• Winner of a Chill with a Book Readers’ Award, June 2018
• A Women Writers, Women’s Books magazine’s Recommended Reads for March 2018
• New Apple’s 2018 Summer Book Awards, Official Selection Mystery/Thriller category
• BookLife Prize for Fiction 2018, Mystery/Thriller category, rating 8.50

Art, religion and history collide in this edge-of-your-seat museum thriller, Book Two of the Zelda Richardson Mystery Series. The novels in this series can be read in any order. **

Review

""Rituals of the Dead" was given to me for an advance review and it just blew me away... This book sees Zelda in the centre of an anthropological mystery where her trusting, yet inquisitive nature, which makes her so endearing to the reader, could potentially spell the end of her life. The pace is fast without being hectic; the intrigue unfolds steadily, sustaining the reader's interest to the very end.
I enjoyed every single line of the book, but my favourite parts were the flashbacks where the author offers a glimpse of a culture that I know very little about. The chapters set in Papua and New Guinea, the insights into the life and rituals of the Asmat people are, in my opinion, priceless. " - Dora Ilieva, mystery author (Goodreads review)

"It isn't often one holds their breath while reading. As I finished the last chapter of Rituals of the Dead, all I could think was wow. Just wow.
History comes alive in this story as Zelda photographs the diary, unearthing a story of murder, greed, missionaries and artifacts. It is not a book one puts down easily. The characters are carefully crafted, engaging you from page one. Alderson takes you from past to present and back again seamlessly as you follow events Zelda has yet to unravel.
Alderson's work is entertaining, engaging, and educational, all that a reader could ask and more. Zelda matures and grows with each volume in the series." - Janice J. Richardson, mystery author (Goodreads review)

From the Author

Author's Note Life is often stranger than fiction, and the coincidences that occur are sometimes extraordinary. In 2008, I worked on an exhibition of Asmat bis poles in the Tropenmuseum, two of which were collected by Michael Rockefeller in 1961. I also witnessed the opening of several crates of Asmat artifacts that had been lying in the depot of Rotterdam's Wereldmuseum (World Museum) for more than fifty years. Because a paradigm shift occurred while these objects were on a ship destined for the Netherlands, they were moved from the freighter to the depot and forgotten about. During my internship, the Tropenmuseum (Museum of the Tropics) was also wrestling with an extensive collection of human remains, many of which were collected in the 1930s through the 1960s in Dutch New Guinea. Because the chapters set in the Asmat region take place in 1962, I refer to historical events as taking place in "Dutch New Guinea." Nowadays, this region is part of the Indonesian providence of Papua. This is why I also refer to the government of Papua when alluding to contemporary events in the region. These facts provided the context, and several actual museums the settings, for my artifact mystery. The resulting story, all of the characters involved, and the restitution cases discussed in this novel are figments of my imagination.