Paint Me Like Your Dead Girls by Cynthia Murphy (2026)
I don't know art but I know what I like......and I like nothing more than an art-inspired YA mystery bloodily decorated with nightmare-inducing paintings and gruesome exsanguination murders. And it just so happens that this book fills that aching need to watch a determined Nancy Drew-ish teen manage to link turn-of-the-century serial killings to a current and all too active psychopath copycat.
Fliss Keller, to the amazement of her Art Historian father, comes across a long sought after disturbing portrait of an agonized man presumably just before his unknowable, terrible death. The painting to the excitement of the art world, completes a set that includes four equally notorious, haunted faces. They're the faces of four young women who look as if death itself has also come for them.......paintings already on display in the art gallery Fliss's dad oversees.
Secret papers Fliss discovers in the back of the painting might imply it's the work of a serial killer artist and the accompanying four portraits are those of his victims, modeling for him before they died at his hands. While she's co-housesitting with her best friend Izzy, Fliss's dogged research traces the killer and his prey back to the early 1900's........but someone else has been busy too. Someone who, inspired by the five paintings has taken to murdering women in the same manner as the original demented artist.
The art world premise intrigued me from the start and author Cynthia Murphy keeps the pacing swift and the pages flying by. And as obvious as it played out, I still thrilled to that banger of a horror movie grand finale, with Fliss facing off, as you knew she eventually would, with the scares of a surprise cuckoo perp who's nuttier than a warehouse full of peanut M & Ms. Great, breathless and very cinematic stuff.
Creepy good fun, with even a touch of romance thrown in. With an art gallery where you might rather dive out the window than exit through the gift shop.
Fliss Keller, to the amazement of her Art Historian father, comes across a long sought after disturbing portrait of an agonized man presumably just before his unknowable, terrible death. The painting to the excitement of the art world, completes a set that includes four equally notorious, haunted faces. They're the faces of four young women who look as if death itself has also come for them.......paintings already on display in the art gallery Fliss's dad oversees.
Secret papers Fliss discovers in the back of the painting might imply it's the work of a serial killer artist and the accompanying four portraits are those of his victims, modeling for him before they died at his hands. While she's co-housesitting with her best friend Izzy, Fliss's dogged research traces the killer and his prey back to the early 1900's........but someone else has been busy too. Someone who, inspired by the five paintings has taken to murdering women in the same manner as the original demented artist.
The art world premise intrigued me from the start and author Cynthia Murphy keeps the pacing swift and the pages flying by. And as obvious as it played out, I still thrilled to that banger of a horror movie grand finale, with Fliss facing off, as you knew she eventually would, with the scares of a surprise cuckoo perp who's nuttier than a warehouse full of peanut M & Ms. Great, breathless and very cinematic stuff.
Creepy good fun, with even a touch of romance thrown in. With an art gallery where you might rather dive out the window than exit through the gift shop.
4 stars (****).
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