THE CANVAS

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.