Paper Plus Art Plus Murder

Taylor Holden’s first novel, The Sense of Paper, is an elegant, edible paperback original from Bantam. Here’s what I wrote (and had to remove, for lack of space) from my last Chicago Tribune column:

If the idea of beautiful, handmade paper or a painting by the famed 19th-century British landscape artist J.M.W. Turner gets you as excited as reading a sharp and sad mystery, this new novel--her first--from a British journalist who specializes in covering wars should satisfy all your cravings.

Charlotte “Charlie” Hudson, recovering slowly from the physical and psychological wounds of her coverage of the war in Kosovo, becomes fascinated with handmade art papers--especially the ones used by Turner. This leads to a romantic connection with another British painter--whose daughter’s suicide is beginning to look much more like murder. Holden manages to be as interesting about the history of paper as she is about modern crime.