Simon & Schuster
Published May 19, 2026
Reviewed by Meredith Frazier
In 2004, student Lena Connolly goes on an archaeological dig in Italy, and her professor/dig leader disappears. In 2022, Lena is a lawyer, and because she speaks Italian, she is recruited to work on a case involving a museum curator, a fabulous artifact with questionable provenance, and the Italian government’s request to repatriate a number of items in the museum’s collection. When Lena realizes that many of the people involved are connected to her summer in Italy, she begins to suspect her assignment to the case is more than a coincidence. When two of the people involved tell her to be careful and lie low, Lena realizes that events of the past have begun to add up to real danger in the present.
Alternating between the two time periods, Artifacts takes the reader on a journey into the world of priceless art and all that lies behind the shiny facade presented by museums. Italian organized crime, shady deals posing as legitimate tax write-offs, and politics raise questions about to whom the past belongs and how the artifacts of that past should be handled. Mixed in with a great deal of well-presented ancient Italian and European history is Lena’s own troubled past and the present complications that past has engendered. In the end, Lena finds some answers—both personal and professional—but this is not a traditional whodunit, and justice, solutions, and explanations are slippery.
That’s not to say the ending isn’t satisfying, though. While not everything gets neatly explained, and bigger cultural questions linger, there is a sense of at least some resolution. Lemle packs a lot of ancient history, a lot of philosophical and moral questions, and a lot of well-developed characters and intricate relationships into a novel that is propelled by questions that go beyond both Lena’s journey of self-discovery and the discovery of answers about the provenance of an artifact, and the mysterious disappearance of the man who was searching for the answers that artifact and others like it might reveal.