An action-filled, educational romp through a treacherous world with roots in the Renaissance.
In Stone’s thriller, the conclusion of a trilogy, trouble’s afoot in the international art market as malefactors target the Vatican.
In this work, the author follows up The Canvas (2023) with the third installment in the Big Picture trilogy. Protagonist Emma Kelly is an art recovery agent. Her current mission is to locate 70 works that were originally bequeathed to the Vatican but have since been stolen. To complicate matters, it’s unclear how many of the works were authentic. If any counterfeit items manage to find their way into the Vatican’s galleries, “it would take centuries to restore [their] status.” (What truly drives Emma is her desire to find a Raphael painting titled Portrait of a Young Man that went missing during World War II.) Emma theorizes that “someone [is] waging and winning a global smear campaign against the Vatican,” even if “the city-state usually [does] a fine job creating its own bad press.” The culprit behind this smear campaign seems to be related to the Medici family and “part of a conspiracy to take over” the papacy. (“Since money did not bestow legitimacy, they had to find other ways to promote how they wanted to be seen: art, marriages, murder.”) However, the line of Medicis most people would associate with the family name ended in the 18th century; in the present day, “there are only descendants.” The story kicks off the day after a terrorist bombing in Rome, one that took place at the Pantheon and was actually an attempt to kill Emma.
Emma (or Emmaline, as she’s known to some) is hardly a mild-mannered art history buff—she lives a double life with a husband in New York and another husband in London. Her globe-hopping exploits yield a plethora of intriguing details; for instance, readers learn about something known as the “Family Pact,” an agreement signed in the 1700s that prohibited great works (everything “from the statue of David to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus”) from leaving Florence and helped to cement the city’s importance on the world stage for centuries to come. Readers follow Emma to the museum that contains the statue of David, a place that sees some 4,000 visitors a day and also contains the Gipsoteca, a “hall of models, with its hundreds of sculptures and plaster models, and a few paintings.” It’s fascinating stuff, but Emma also has a tendency to offer descriptions of less compelling administrative tasks (“I had an email from Florence Bracewell, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Met. She wanted a lunch meeting”) that prove to be extraneous—such material can make the narrative drag. Fortunately, the plot features plenty of elements like drones with “glass-shattering missiles” and attacks by “one hundred-pound Giant Schnauzers” to keep things lively. Taken together, the work provides pleasures beyond those of the typical thriller. Emma may have her secrets and she faces her share of danger, but the edifying, welcome emphasis on art and art history is what truly shines throughout these pages.
An action-filled, educational romp through a treacherous world with roots in the Renaissance.Pub Date: today
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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