Customer Reviews

Old Scores

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If you love mysteries dealing with art then you will love this book. Chris Norgren is a curator for the Seattle Art Museum and he gets involved in some interesting adventures.

Pick up this book or one of the others in the series, I am sure you will agree with me that it is well worth your time. It is an interesting read.

Aaron Elkins wrote three books in the Chris Norgren series: "Old Scores", "A Deceptive Clarity" and "Glancing Light".

I wish Mr. Elkins would continue the series.

When eccentric art patron, Rene Vachey, decides to donate an original Rembrandt to the Seattle Art Museum, curator Chris Norgren is cautious. Rene is known for playing tricks on museums and making them look silly so Chris flies to France to inspect the painting. Shortly after he arrives, he is thrown out a window and later that night, Rene is murdered. Fearing that the painting may be the reason for the murder, Chris starts to investigate. I love this series because of the way that Aaron Elkins shows artwork through the eyes of Chris Norgren as well as for the good mystery.

A famous art collector wants to give the Seattle Art Museum an original Rembrandt...so why isn't Chris Norgren, curator of Renaissance and Baroque Art, smiling? Perhaps because the gift seems too good to be true. The collector is the elderly Rene Vachey, one of the art world's most controversial eccentrics. The Rembrandt has come out of nowhere...in fact, from a Paris junk shop...with no known history of ownership. Vachey will let Chris examine the painting, but he's not allowed to make scientific tests before he officially accepts the painting for the museum. Could the whole episode be a cruel hoax? In attempting to find out Chris must use all his wits and expertise in a perplexing quest for a killer, the evaluation of a painting, and the untangling of a complex man's many layered past.

I have read several Aaron Elkins books but this was the first involving Chris Norgren. Chris is a curator of Renaissance art at the Seattle Art Museum and goes to Paris to view a newly found Rembrandt that is being given to the museum by Rene Vachey. Rene is known in the field as a jokester and Chris is dubious as to the authenticity of the painting, especially with the limitations Rene has set on what can be used to verify the painting as being a Rembrandt.

Things heat up and get pretty hairy as Rene Vachey is killed and Chris becomes the next target for murder. Who knew that the art world was so dangerous?

I will join the chorus of people wanting more of Chris Norgren. Three books are nowhere near enough. However as this 3rd one was written about 20 years ago, we may not be getting our wish.

Aaron Elkins endowed this Chris Norgren detective story with his patented light touch and rapidly moving plot. There is a serious side to it, should a museum be buying a painting that was part of Nazi loot in France, and there is a more common dilemma, is the painting being offered the museum, in which Norgren is employed as a curator, a fake Rembrandt. Above all, who murdered the art dealer at the center of both these dilemmas.

Readers of other Elkins series (including that with his wife, Charlotte, are sure to find this book entertaining. Newcomers to Elkins worlds are likely to read this and come back for more. Just the thing for a transportation waiting room (or while standing wistfully gazing in the direction from which a bus is supposed to be coming). Suitable as well for actual travel or while trying to occupy the hours of insomnia.

Note that there is a Kindle edition available (as of this moment) at a price below that of Amazon shipping charges.