Fun and illuminating, with a few threads left dangling for the next installment.
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
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
