CRIMES AND SINS

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.