The romance becomes off-putting, but the remainder of this art-world thriller zings.
A lost painting attributed to Rembrandt resurfaces, sparking a pursuit by rich collectors, criminals, and the rightful heir.
“Thieves! Thieves! You’re peddling Nazi plunder!” With these words, Daniel Stein interrupts the $50 million auction of a Rembrandt painting titled Girl with Cat. He recognizes it as a work belonging to his grandfather, who was murdered in 1940 by the Nazis, who stole his valuable art collection. The auction’s bidding started at $10 million and could have reached far higher, but now the sale is halted to investigate Daniel’s hotly contested claim. Interested parties include professor Ward Aynsworth of Columbia University, an art expert retained to authenticate the piece by Wellington’s, the auction house; British auction supervisor Doria Wetton; and Forbes Harrington, a ruthless businessman who tasks his art adviser, Langford Jameson, with obtaining the picture. Centrally involved is Cory Chandler, a 20-something “rakishly handsome” recent widower who teaches art appreciation at a California community college. New to the field and unpublished, he nevertheless becomes Stein’s advocate. The unfolding story takes readers into high-end art’s seamy side: Nazi theft, the forgery process and its complications, unscrupulous private collectors, Swiss bank vaults, and money laundering. As Daniel and Cory track the painting in Europe, they race against shady art dealers and mob loan sharks. Dall (Snapshot, 2014) writes a twisty, engaging thriller bolstered by absorbing details, such as practices and methods of art forgery or the establishment of provenance. The story moves at a nice clip, and Dall keeps the reader well oriented among a plethora of characters. The author falters, though, with Doria, 26, who seems like a throwback to another era. She works at the world’s third-largest auction house, supervising multimillion-dollar sales, but to Cory, she looks like “a little girl posing in daddy’s chair.” He calls her “sweetheart,” winks at her, and tells her to “clamp the hostility.” Few ambitious women would be attracted to such condescension, but Doria loves it, even gladly giving up her prestigious job to support Cory’s dreams.
The romance becomes off-putting, but the remainder of this art-world thriller zings.Pub Date: June 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5328-5307-4
Page Count: 154
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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