An exceedingly intelligent private-eye tale that offers a peek into the darker corners of art-world commerce.
In Witham’s latest mystery in a series, private investigator Julian Peale looks into the mysterious death of a rising young artist and discovers a web of criminal conspiracy.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology student Colleen Mason is shocked when she discovers that her estranged older brother, Sam, a 28-year-old painter, had died suddenly due to an overdose,according to authorities. She’s also astonished to learn that he is widely considered to have been a creative genius, and that many art dealers are eager to locate his work, which seems to have simply vanished. Colleen refuses to believe that Sam died by accident, or by suicide; in fact, she’s sure that he was murdered, and she hires Julian, a PI with a specialty in art crimes, to dig deeper. He soon learns that Sam was promoted by Curator Services, a dubious outfit that runs “vanity operations” for artists, manufacturing public impressions that their works are in great demand—a “borderline criminal” scheme of Victor Kamin and Max Dunnaway, who have ties to Albanian organized crime. Monica Smithton, a Boston-based art dealer looking for Sam’s work, has similar ties, although she labors to keep them concealed. In this enthralling whodunit, Witham takes the reader on a gripping tour of the “shifty parts of the art world.” As Trisha Donnally, the talent scout who originally found Sam, puts it: “I guess I knew there were two sides, or many sides, to the art world, one dark and one light.” The novel adeptly creates an atmosphere of violent menace in which a young, idealist painter with openminded beliefs—Sam was fascinated by the occult and “a mysterious beyond that influences creativity”—falls prey to cynical jackals. The plot is complex but never convoluted, and for all its intelligence and nuance, it moves at an entertainingly brisk pace. Overall, it’s a delightful, thoughtful, and quietly powerful read for anyone who loves art and crime dramas.
An exceedingly intelligent private-eye tale that offers a peek into the darker corners of art-world commerce.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781665772600
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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
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