Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT

Next book

THE CANVAS

From the The Big Picture Trilogy series , Vol. 2

Fun and illuminating, with a few threads left dangling for the next installment.

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT

The second volume in Stone’s Big Picture thriller trilogy finds murder and skullduggery in the high-priced world of fine art.

Emma Kelly, who runs an art recovery agency and is an adjunct professor of art history (with a special interest in the artistic portrayal of biblical women), is at the National Museum for Women in the Arts to meet the world-famous artist Julia Belvedere Jones. With Emma is her husband, Elliot Baldwin, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s New York field office. The museum has acquired a new work by Julia, but the artist says she did not paint it. The subjects in the painting are David, Bathsheba, and Uriah the Hittite. Emma and Elliot are stunned when they see their own visages staring back at them from the canvas. Stranger still, the face of Uriah resembles that of Emma’s former husband, Jason, who was murdered three years earlier while on assignment for his FBI superior, Elliot. Emma is secretly living a double life that takes her back and forth to her “other” home in England—as the story unspools, Emma, who becomes the target of a deranged killer, is set on a path that brings her two worlds dangerously close to a head-on collision. The personal drama is only one part of Stone’s complex mystery—the novel also pulls back the curtain to reveal the grimy backstage machinations and duplicities behind the gloss of the fashionable galleries and auction houses that unwittingly, and sometimes knowingly, serve as money launderers for an assortment of bad actors. Stone also offers a detailed primer on the investigative and testing processes used to authenticate antique works of art (“Private firms use AI to compare artwork to works by the same artist…It’ll take a few weeks to get the heat map that highlights the areas of primary concern for human connoisseurs to investigate further”). Although the lengthy discussions of art history (and liberal indulgences in art-world name dropping) occasionally slow the action, there is sufficient tension and mayhem to keep the pages turning.

Fun and illuminating, with a few threads left dangling for the next installment.

Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2023

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 250

Publisher: Level Best Books

Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024

Next book

A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 10


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

Next book

NOW OR NEVER

As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 10


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

Stephanie Plum’s 31st adventure shows that Trenton’s preeminent fugitive-apprehension agent still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve, and needs every one of them.

The current caseload for Stephanie and Lula—the ex-prostitute file clerk at her cousin Vincent Plum’s bail bonds company, who serves as her unflappable sidekick—begins with two “failures to appear.” Eugene Fleck is suspected of being Robin Hoodie, who robs from the rich and, yes, distributes the proceeds to the poor. Racketeer Bruno Jug, who’s missed his court date on charges of tax evasion, is also suspected of drugging and raping a 14-year-old. But neither of these fugitives can hold a candle to Zoran Djordjevic, aka Fang, a self-proclaimed vampire wanted in connection with the gruesome fate of his late wife and three other missing women. As usual, Stephanie’s personal life is just as helter-skelter as her professional life as a bounty hunter. She’s managed to get herself engaged both to Det. Joe Morelli, of the Trenton PD, and Ranger, a former Special Forces agent who runs a private security firm; she thinks she may be pregnant; and she’s willing to marry the father, whichever of her fiances that turns out to be. On top of it all, her nothingburger schoolmate Herbert Slovinski suddenly pops up at one of the funerals she ferries her Grandma Mazur to, hitting on her relentlessly and gilding his importunities by cleaning and painting her shabby apartment and laying new carpet. Luckily, Lula’s on hand to offer cupcakes that stave off the worst disasters, and whenever this hodgepodge threatens to slow down, another FTA appears, or fails to appear.

As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.

Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024

ISBN: 9781668003138

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024

Close Quickview