Charming character study of an attractive turn-of-the-century con man. Noah's first novel, All the Right Answers (1988), deftly traced the quiz-show scandal of the late 1950s and featured a similarly charming scoundrel/rigger of game shows. The story this time begins on August 21, 1911, when Leonardo's La Gioconda is stolen from the Louvre. Who masterminded the theft? According to an article printed in 1932 in the Saturday Evening Post, a certain Marquis de Valfierno was responsible, and upon this pedestal Noah shapes his tale. At 56, the Marquis has a long history of selling forgeries of lost paintings by old masters, even though these ``lost'' paintings never in fact existed. They are instead the original products of one Yves Chaudron, an extraordinary young copyist whose brilliant future is subverted by the Marquis into making the supposedly lost ``originals'' by Murillo and others—which the Marquis has sold in Buenos Aires and now hawks as priceless works in Mexico City. When the Marquis falls in love with Rosa Maria, his barber's 16-year-old daughter, then impregnates and marries her, he foresees that she and his child will long outlive him. Not even his skills as a con man can raise enough money to carry her through the rest of her life without him. And so he dreams up his grand farewell theft of the Mona Lisa, moving his crew, his barber, and Rosa Maria to Paris and preparing to rape the Louvre of its smiling Leonardo. When the theft takes place, the Marquis is in New York, having set up six different buyers before the picture was even stolen. With the original hidden in Paris, he instructs Chaudron to paint six copies and sells four of them to Americans. And how does the original return to the Louvre? Witty dialogue and a thoroughly colorful cast of rogues.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-16916-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Brimming with warmth and vitality, this new novel by the author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) is a paean to the power of female courage. The butterflies are four smart and lovely Dominican sisters growing up during Trujillo's despotic regime. While her parents try desperately to cling to their imagined island of security in a swelling sea of fear and intimidation, Minerva Mirabal—the sharpest and boldest of the daughters, born with a fierce will to fight injustice—jumps headfirst into the revolutionary tide. Her sisters come upon their courage more gradually, through a passionate, protective love of family or through the sheer impossibility of closing their eyes to the horrors around them. Together, their bravery and determination meld into a seemingly insurmountable force, making Trujillo, for all his power, appear a puny adversary. Alvarez writes beautifully, whether creating the ten-year-old Maria Teresa's charming diary entries or describing Minerva's trip home after her first unsettling confrontation with Trujillo: ``As the road darkened, the beams of our headlights filled with hundreds of blinded moths. Where they hit the windshield, they left blurry marks, until it seemed like I was looking at the world through a curtain of tears.'' If the Mirabal sisters are iron-winged butterflies, their men—father and husbands—often resemble those blinded moths, feeble and fallible. Still, the women view them with kind, forgiving eyes, and though there's no question of which sex is being celebrated here, a sweet and accepting spirit toward frailty, if not human cruelty, prevails. This is not Garc°a M†rquez or Allende territory (no green hair or floating bodies); Alvarez's voice is her own, grounded in realism yet alive with the magic of everyday human beings who summon extraordinary courage and determination to fight for their beliefs. As mesmerizing as the Mirabal sisters themselves. (First printing of 40,000; $40,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56512-038-8
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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