WOMAN WITH EYES CLOSED

Matthiessen’s literary thriller centers around stolen artworks.

The story opens with a tense fictional recreation of the 2012 break-in at the Kunsthal art museum in Rotterdam, Netherlands, as a group of thieves hurries to steal priceless works of art before the museum’s alarms bring the police (“Shards of glass were everywhere, popping and cracking under their sneakers. He heard a far-off siren”). The thieves get away with some Monets, a Picasso, and a painting called “Woman With Eyes Closed” by a painter named Hochberg. The artist was a friend of 86-year-old George Clayton, so, naturally, news of the theft is a persistent topic of conversation among the Hamptons elites of Clayton’s artist community in Sagaponack, New York, where Clayton’s daughter, Perrin, lives with her rich husband, high-flying art-world star Jack Triplett. (“His works were in many international airports and the lobbies of major hotels.”) Drawn into this world by the crime is MI-6 agent Kit Hobbs, whose investigation into the possibility that a Russian dealer is involved in fencing the stolen artwork in Sagaponack brings him into contact with Perrin, who may be able to save Hobbs from the trauma that’s been eating away at him since an earlier mission went horribly wrong (when readers meet Hobbs, he feels as though he’s “dripping” with death and despair). By slow and steady degrees, Matthiessen takes all these familiar elements of the standard heist thriller and transforms them into something more. Readers who might initially feel that too much time is being spent focusing on the lives and relationships of the thieves, for instance, will find themselves increasingly fascinated by the author’s ability to bring all the disparate worlds of the narrative to vivid life. Just as Hobbs is drawn to Perrin (“the sound of her voice, her courage and her forlornness”), readers will be totally engrossed.

A riveting and richly nuanced art-crime novel.