Dark Side of the Moon

This is my newest novel, with new characters:

"When a dead body washes up on the rocks outside her grandfather’s Maine house, art historian Lin Abrams’ peaceful sabbatical is rudely interrupted. She becomes entangled with Zach, the boy who found the body, and Zach’s mysterious father, Steven Calloway. Steven recruits Lin to help solve a problem: what do paintings, drug smuggling, and cults have to do with each other? Answer: money laundering, and perhaps the location of Lin’s missing daughter."

It is set on the coast of Maine, where my grandfather had a house near Biddeford and a magical beach, complete with huge rocks for sitting and climbing. 

The cover was created by my granddaughter, Fable, after I noticed the artwork she was making on her laptop. It was a wonderful experience going back and forth talking about theme, design, and color. She made me proud.

ebook (also on Hoopla and several other platforms)

print edition

audio book

 Fable Wisseman audio cover

The Flora Garibaldi Art History Mysteries

Flora Garibaldi is a half-Italian conservator working and living in Italy. She grew out of my first excavation experience near Siena, my favorite medieval town. Subsequent trips to Italy took me all over to the many museums I needed to visit to write my archaeology dissertation. I fell in love with the country, the food, and the language, but I didn't live there long enough to feel like a true native.

This series grew out of my intense interest in antiquities smuggling and art forgery, perhaps because of my experience of being named an art "curator" when my training was still very recent. How could I weight in as an expert on any type of object, or decide if something was authentic without help? 

The answers came from my next job in the interdisiplinary field of archaeometry, or archaeological science, which forced me to learn about scientific techniques now used by modern conservators and other researchers who want to know where and how a painting or vase was constructed and how it traveled from its place of manufacture to its current home. Chemistry is especially useful in such work, because obtaining the chemical composition of something can tell you what type of clay was used in pottery, or whether a pigment is ancient or modern. And medical imaging (X-rays and CT scans) can reveal rhe technology of a terracotta statue or what's inside a mummy (an animal, or a bunch of reeds?)

The Lisa Donahue Archaeological Mysteries

I used to work in an attic museum with multiple rooms off a dark hallway, a trick elevator, and an archaic security system. Pigeons flew in and out of the galleries after sneaking in from a broken window, and locking up at night was so spooky that I decided a mystery should be set there. Add a mummy project to the mix and  the novel Bound for Eternity was born: Lisa Donahue, archaeologist and museum curator, discovers that an Egyptian mummy holds the clues to murder in her Boston museum.

Book2, The Dead Sea Codex, is a prequel to B for E even though I wrote it later: A younger Lisa returns to Israel to help a former lover investigate a mysterious ancient document that appears on the black market. It is set in Israel (where I lived and studied archaeology for almost two years in the 1970s).

Book 3, The Fall of Augustus: When someone kills Lisa Donahue’s boss by dropping a Roman statue on him, she becomes Interim Director of her Boston University Museum. Suddenly she’s juggling murder, artifact theft, and a complicated move into a new building. Then the treacherous Dean announces her replacement: a vicious woman from Lisa’s past…

Book 4, The House of the Sphinx: Lisa Donahue and her physician husband James Barber hope their delayed honeymoon in Egypt will be a peaceful trip in an exotic setting. Instead, their Nile cruise is overshadowed by rumors of a deadly disease. After James recognizes the symptoms of smallpox at Karnak, he is recruited as a medical officer by the Centers for Disease Control. When their cruise ship is quarantined, Lisa is separated from her husband. Terrified that James will succumb to the disease he is fighting, Lisa helps an old flame investigate a plot that could ignite the entire Middle East: infecting Western tourists with smallpox virus stolen from the former Soviet Union.

All four novels are available as ebooks (multiple markets, including Hoopla), print, and audio.

Skullduggery in Archaeology and Art History

What happens to cultural artifacts (e.g. an Egyptian mummy, a Greek vase, or an 18^th century painting) after their creators are dead? Potentially valuable or exotic objects are exported, copied, displayed in museums, or hidden from public view in warehouses and private collections.

Across the world, art and artifacts turn out to be worth what people will pay, and sometimes reputable museums turn a blind eye to objects acquired with dubious provenances. This class examines several topics, including colonial appropriation by several countries of Mediterranean antiquities and the looting of archaeological sites. We will also examine famous cases of forged artifacts in museums and how curators and scientists work together to unmask forgeries. OLLI at Illinois 2026 spring course.

Links of interest:

The illegal market in antiquities.

Novafilm “The Fine Art of Faking It.” Wonderful documentary on art forgery, including stories of a Grunevald painting, the Getty Museum Greek kouros, the Rembrandt research team, and many other famous cases. (NOVA 1991)

The Shroud of Turin revisited.

Sarah's "Shroud of Charlie" illustrates how a 3D face rubbing does NOT resemble the Shroud...

Non-destructive research on the University of Illinois Egyptian mummy.

Fake Dead Sea Scrolls at the Bible Museum in Washington DC.

Forgery of a Winslow Homer painting?

Archaeology Underwater and from the Air, Part IV

Our fourth class focus is North America and underwater archaeology on the east and west coasts and the Great Lakes. The most interesting takeaway is how recent discoveries document the movements of early hunter-gatherers into and across the U.S. much earlier than 12,000 years ago.

Videos:

Shallow water archaeology in Florida with Jessica Cook-Hale

another north Floria river project

First Americans and Clovis debate

"Stonehenge" under Lake Michigan

 

Archaeology Underwater and from the Air, Part III

In our third class, we contined to explore shipwrecks around the Mediterranean, especially off the coasts of Israel, Turkey, Sicily, and Greece. The focus was digs which special challenges (depth, interference by thrill seekers) and the incredible finds of metalworking and glassworking debris from sites explored by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in Texas. Then we switched to South and Central America, illustrating the new cities and sites found by LiDAR and analyzed with AI. My favorite is the Mayan city Valeriana, discovered by a graduate student working at home on his computer (he used LiDAR data collected by another team for a different purpose 10 years ago).

Other links and videos:

Classical wreck off the coast of Sicily (embedded video on website shows unusual preservation of wood)

The "Glass Shipwreck" at Serce Limani, Turkey

 "Jesus boat" video

Archaeology Underwater and from the Air, Part II

 We discussed space archaeology, especially the work of Sarah Parcak, in Egypt, Asia, and around the Mediterranean Sea. There are many examples of upgraded LiDar and other surveying techniques combined with older aerial photos, helping archaeologists find whole cities in the ancient world. Data are integrated by artificial intelligence, resulting in new maps of extensive areas in the former Soviet Union and the Arabian peninsula.

Then we switched to deepwater shipwrecks and introduced sonar and other techniques used underwater to locate and map sites. Here are some of the web links and videos from class:

Cemetery in Sudan (National Geographic)

7.000 year old road discovered off coast of Croatia

Minoan shipwreck

Uluburun wreck found off coast of Bodrun, Turkey (Institute of Nautical Archaeology)

Uluburun video