From Publishers Weekly
Jonathan Argyll, accompanied by his new wife, Flavia di Stefano, makes his seventh appearance in this confusing case of a stolen painting, murder and intrigue, following 1998's well-received An Instance of the Fingerpost. Antonio Sabauda, the Italian prime minister, asks Flavia, now acting head of the national art squad, to recover Claude Lorraine's Landscape with Cephalis and Procris, stolen from an Italian museum while on loan from the Louvre. Flavia, however, must not use public money for the requested ransom. As Flavia's former boss, Gen. Taddeo Bottando, has told her, "Prime ministers? Oh, they can ruin your life." She finds this is true on many levels. Meanwhile, Argyll, the art expert, is snooping into the provenance of a small painting owned by Bottando. Soon Argyll and Flavia find that almost everyone they talk to in their respective investigations has a hidden agenda. Who is behind all the shady goings-on in the art world? Is it Prime Minister Sabauda, General Bottando or another person with something to protect? Ultimately, as people's motives become clearer and one corpse after another turns up, Argyll and Flavia find that they have to make some very disturbing choices involving their own sense of morality. A personal secret that Flavia harbors until the end adds some intrigue. While the author nicely portrays the Italian art world, readers looking for a scintillating mystery will have to seek elsewhere.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
The success of Pears' majesterial literary thriller
An Instance of the Fingerpost (1998) has brought renewed attention to his outstanding series of art mysteries starring erstwhile art-history professor Jonathan Argyll and his wife, Flavia di Stefano, of the Rome police's art theft squad. This seventh in the series may well be the best yet. Change is in the wind from multiple directions: Jonathan and Flavia, only recently married, are stunned to discover they will soon be parents, and Flavia, acting head of the art squad, learns that her mentor and former boss, General Bottando, will be retiring--and she is by no means a sure thing to succeed him as permanent head of the department. Then the bizarre theft of a painting on loan to Italy from the Louvre leads to a decades-old case of murder and political corruption that further ensnares Flavia in a bureaucratic sinkhole. Meanwhile, Argyll is traipsing about Tuscany, where he stumbles into some remarkable discoveries that seem to link Bottando to the stolen painting. Art-themed mysteries possess natural appeal (stealing a painting is such an irresistibly sophisticated crime), but too often the art-history lessons are unsuccessfully melded to the plot. Not so here, as Pears masterfully incorporates the missing painting's history into the fabric of the story. Best of all, though, is his wonderful grasp of the moral ambiguity at the heart of Italian life. Bottando and Flavia possess that uniquely Italian grasp of the inevitability of corruption, and the English Argyll is catching on quite nicely. The result is a wonderfully appealing cast of characters whose abiding distrust of institutions forms the bedrock of their commitment to each other. Despite their profoundly ironic view of the world, Pears' people are by no means melancholy cynics; rather, they possess a joie de vivre that seems to flow from the startling discovery that, even in a world soiled by universal corruption, on the one hand, and deadly idealism, on the other, it's still possible to look at beautiful pictures or enjoy a delicious lunch.
Bill OttCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
