FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: HAS JANE AUSTEN RETURNED AS AN ART HISTORIAN FROM MILFORD?

If Jane Austen wrote a mystery, this would be it!" This enthusiastic sentiment expressed by a reader of Grave Circle: An Ivory Tower Mystery, a new novel by Boston-based Art Historian David D. Nolta, echoes in the New Mystery Reader by a reviewer who states that Grave Circle is perfect for those who always wondered just what Jane Austen would be writing if she were alive today."

Costa Mesa, CA (PRWEB) January 23, 2004 -- What is it about this New England-themed mystery, in which a pair of endearing, eccentric professors seek the murderer of a lascivious faculty wife at a prestigious (albeit imaginary) Massachusetts college, which invites such striking literary comparisons? Nolta is a writer dedicated to upholding the tradition of storytelling in a grand style that derives from the respected prose writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He will tell you that Jane Austen, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and William Maxwell are among his great guides, because these writers spent their lives conjuring up vivid, refined worlds and peopling them with unforgettable, even tangible, characters." Nolta belongs to a shrinking but tenacious group of writers who offer an alternative to the modern American media-oriented school of fiction writing. He believes first and foremost that all good fiction begins with lucid and faithful description--of place, of character, of action and, finally, of thought. As an art historian, he has been trained to describe works of art in ways that reveal their various meanings. His rich and evocative style of pictorial analysis can be seen in every carefully chosen word of his fiction writing.

He refers to his own life as a manifestation of the charmed but highly insecure existence of the eternal student" (he went directly from high school to college (The University of Michigan), then directly to graduate school in English Literature (University of Chicago), transferring to another graduate school to pursue art history (Yale University). This lifelong intimacy with scholars and scholarship (at Yale Nolta even served as the wine steward at Berkeley College, living with the then Master of the College, the late historian and Boston Globe mystery reviewer, Robin Winks)has resulted in the creation of an astounding number of unique and memorable characters and situations. Some of Nolta's favorite targets are scholarly pomposity and hypocrisy, sexual pride and naiveté, anglophilia, and academic envy.

Though his situations invariably unfold in academic settings, and though his central characters, sibling professorial sleuths Antigone and Hiawatha Musing, are, whether they like it or not, very much IN the Ivory Tower, there is much in Nolta's fiction that has to do with life in general. Moving well beyond the standard or formulaic mystery, Grave Circle is a love story, a farce, and a story of survival--at least for some. Imaginatively conceived and elegantly composed, it invites the intelligent reader into a world where people as unique as each of us do strange, noble, and sometimes terrible things.

Even as the admiration for the writing of David D. Nolta and the popularity of Grave Circle grow, some readers are already asking what the future holds for Hiawatha and Antigone Musing. In the forthcoming second book of the Ivory Tower Mystery series, the sibling sleuths puzzle through two murders that occur at the English country estate Lostlindens, where Hiawatha leads a group of American literature students whose studies naturally include the work of Jane Austen. Transposing one of Ms. Austens own ironic observations, taken from her novel Emma--'I know you cannot have heard from Jane lately, because it is not her time for writing;'--one might brightly respond: While we regret that it is no longer Janes time for writing, we are extraordinarily pleased to announce that David D. Noltas time has unquestionably arrived.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION OR A READERS COPY of Grave Circle please contact Holly C. Gruber at Quality Words In Print, (714) 436-5700 or hgruber@qwipbooks.com.

Grave Circle: An Ivory Tower Mystery by David D. Nolta (hardcover, 304 pages, $21.95) was published by Quality Words In Print in 2003, and is available through major internet booksellers and selected bookstores.

Quality Words In Print is an independent publisher of literary fiction and non-fiction based in Costa Mesa, California.

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