The Body in the Gallery by Katherine Hall Page (2009, Paperback, Reprint)

The book opens with Faith Fairchild and her good friend, Patsy Avery, planning a "break in" at the Ganley Art Museum. This won't be a typical break in....Patsy is president of the board of trustees and has the key, but it will be done at night and she needs Faith to slip under the security beams, since she is thinner. Patsy strongly believes that the small painting by Romare Bearden that she and her husband, Will, loaned to the museum has been replaced with a forgery and she needs photos to take to art experts. Sure enough, it is a fake, but Patsy wants it kept quiet for now. In the meantime, she hires Faith to take over the museum's cafe. This way Faith can keep her eyes and ears open since they both believe it is an inside job. When the museum puts on a "New England Rocks!" exhibition, with Faith as caterer, all seems to run smoothly until she discovers the body of a very beautiful , bald, woman floating in what was a real artistic fish tank. Nobody claims to know her. The girl called herself Tess Auchincloss, but digging further it appears she has left no record of her life....she is an enigma to the police and even the people who knew her briefly. Tess had modeled for a few of the teachers at the museum and they knew she had lovely, long red hair before she died. Faith and Patsy believe this all ties into the art work forgery. A second story in this book is about Faith's 12 year old son, Ben, who has just entered middle school. He becomes distant, moody and mean and drops his best friend, Josh to run around with an older boy. I almost gave the book less than an "Average" because I was disturbed by the way Faith and her minister husband, Tom, handled Ben's nasty attitude toward them. He would scream at them and refuse to obey and yet they both had very little backbone to do anything but look at him and tell themselves this wasn't a good time to talk to him. Tomorrow would be better. Same way when they heard things about him and the new boy. It was like Faith was afraid to confront the truth about her son. He'd slam doors in her face and get ugly, but she'd back down, until there came a time she couldn't do that anymore due to the circumstances. Bad parenting came to mind this whole time. Her husband started to blame her for working so much that she was ignoring their children and maybe what happened was her fault. This caused a rift of sorts for a while until the end of the book. I think they were both to blame. This was the only part of the book I found intolerable. Ms. Hall Page wanted to make a statement of how cyberbullying gets out of control and the consequences that can happen. It's too bad Ben was on the cyberbullying end. It doesn't always end as nice as it did in the book and I do not think Ben's punishment of teaching computer classes to seniors fits the crime. He hurt a lot of kids. The muder mystery started off great and continued to snow ball into what I hoped would be a spectacular ending. I did not guess who was behind the murder, but Ms. Page Hall left out some important information! What about the forged art work? What part did Tess play in all this and why did she shave her own head before she was killed???? It would have been nice to get some answers to these questions since they seemed very important in the book! I may skip the next book.