Customer Reviews

The Sleepers of Erin

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

One of my favorites in the Lovejoy series. As one of the series' earlier books, it lacks the frantic pace the author employs in the last five or six--much more care is taken with the details. There's a bit of everything here--a few harrowing escapes; a qurky thin and tall Irishmen with an equally quirky vehicle; his beautiful cousin who makes all the right moves; the usual scam by money-hungry pursuers and producers of false antiquities; and in the middle-of-it-all, the wise, and contradictorally naive but worldly Lovejoy, the man who understands what's important and oblivious to what is not.

Lovejoy goes to Ireland in order to avenge a friend's death, and to take part in the ultimate "sleeper" scheme. As Lovejoy said - "Times are hard in the antiques industry and it's not the dealers' fault if antiques have to be salted away and redisovered. It's also not his fault if such antiques are not really antiques at all." Welcome to the sleazy world of Lovejoy and his unique look on crime. Who'd have thought there could be so many grey areas? Anyway, this is another good one in the Lovejoy series, and Gash handles his double con job with a deft hand indeed. Can't wait to read more.

The sleepers in the title refer to faked antiques which are made by expert forgers and then stored away until an appropriate time for "discovering" them. In this story, Lovejoy, an antiques dealer who is also a "divvy", a person who can tell a genuine antique from a fake, merely by a certain vibration given out, in much the same way as a water diviner finds water, is taken to Ireland by a pair of crooked collectors and forced into planting fake gold torques in an old, Celtic burial site. The plan is that the fakes will be "accidentally" discovered during a well witnessed walk in the countryside, but Lovejoy discovers, to his horror, that the plan also covers his death in an earth fall-in. I enjoyed this Lovejoy tale although there are others that I enjoyed more.

I read this book maybe 20 years ago, and it was good enough to have stuck in my mind all that time. Just recently I was remembering it fondly, and so I've ordered it from Amazon and am going to read it again. Any book that creates images in your mind that stick around for 20 years is worth another read, right?