PAINT ME GONE

In this novel, a painter will not be brushed off as he investigates a series of threats and deaths seemingly connected to the opening of a new museum.

Wade Strothers, a self-described “sixty-two-year-old with bad knees, lousy prostate, dizzy spells, and a missing finger joint,” has the soul of an artist but the temperament of a cynical, misanthropic 1940s movie sleuth. “I neither follow nor take direction well,” the painter remarks. Just ask Sybil Visser, president of the Chesapeake Watermedia Society. Wade is on the outs with her and the group’s other select members after a disastrous Washington Post interview in which he was supposed to promote the society and its ambitious plans to establish a national watercolor museum. Instead, he is disrespectfully combative with a young reporter, and the resulting article makes the society an object of derision. But it’s no joke when he receives written threats (“It was fire last time and it will be fire again!”). This may be a reference to a conflagration that 20 years prior destroyed the summer studio of the celebrated painter (and Sybil’s “mentor, paramour and husband”) David-Alan Lawrence, who suffered a fatal heart attack trying to salvage his artworks. The suspicious death of one of Wade’s few friends increases the stakes, and he teams up with Elena Sokolovsky, a fellow artist and romantic interest, to investigate. On the homefront, he is reunited with his estranged daughter, who turns up with her toddler daughter. Cincotta has etched a textured novel that deftly combines vivid characterizations, solid worldbuilding, and a mystery that is anything but paint-by-numbers. The author writes credibly and accessibly about art (“How I could step close to Van Gogh’s canvases and see everything dematerialize into a random set of daubs and splashes of color, without form or pattern. Then step back and back again, and see these arbitrary color pieces resolve into the image of dark olive trees baking under a hot Provence sun”). There are some editing gaffes (the first name of the character Carlton Breeden-Winchester at times is spelled with an errant “E”), but they do not mar the overall story. Readers will hope that this is not the last they hear from the Chesapeake Watermedia Society.

A striking mystery and character study with value and color.