Review by Booklist Review
The art mystery subgenre is a fertile one, tailor-made for audacious theft, outrageous extortion, skillful forgery, and passionate murder. Pears and Skeggs, Englishmen and art historians both, have made art mysteries their specialty and, by an odd coincidence, have each turned to the great Italian master Titian for inspiration in their latest tales.Pears' is the lighter of the two, a romp that produces dead art historians with worrisome regularity. When the first such corpse, formerly the only female member of the illustrious Titian Committee, is discovered among the lilies in a Venice greenhouse, Roman art squad detective Flavia di Stefano is sent to investigate, but not too thoroughly. Her wonderfully unflappable boss warns her against too zealous an inquiry; he's leery of irritating his superiors at budget time. But Flavia, a blunt young woman with an endearingly insatiable appetite for food, sleep, and the truth, becomes obsessed, particularly after another Committee member is found floating in a foul canal. She and her pal Jonathan Argyll, a reluctant art dealer, start checking up on the Committee's activities. They expose a series of nefarious acts that, aptly enough, mirror a scandalous incident from Titian's past, to which he alluded in a series of celebrated murals. A sort of Venetian cozy, amusing and clever.Skeggs has written a far more involved and involving tale about a spectacular heist and its frantic aftermath. One of Titian's most famous paintings, The Triumph of Bacchus (a fictive work based on Titian's pagan masterpiece, Bacchanal of the Andrians) has been stolen from a London museum where it was on loan from a private collection. A sky-high ransom has been set, and the underwriter for Lloyds is desperate. This tense standoff attracts the interest of two very different, yet similarly intense, people. Tommie Shaughnessy seems, at first glance, to be nothing more or less than a hustler, but he cooks up a daring scheme to steal the ransom by passing off a forgery. What sort of rogue has the talent and knowledge necessary for executing a perfect copy of a Titian? One who has worked at Christie's as well as clip joints. Meanwhile, Patricia Drew, a classy and ambitious newscaster, decides that the theft is a perfect subject for a documentary. Once she and Shaughnessy cross paths, we find ourselves intent upon figuring out, first, which side of the law our gifted forger is operating on, and, second, if Patricia is thwarting or helping him. As Shaughnessy penetrates the secrets of Titian's astonishing technique, Skeggs slyly reminds us to look beneath the surface of things. This is a gem: suspenseful, sophisticated, sexy, and funny. ~--Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This playful satire of the squabbling international art scene and the Italian police bureaucracy reunites volcanic beauty Flavia de Stefano of the Italian National Art Theft Squad, and diffident British art dealer Jonathan Argyll, who first met in The Raphael Affair. Set in Venice and first published by Gollancz in 1991, the tale opens with the murder of American art historian Louise Masterson, a member of the scholarly international Titian Committee, who is found stabbed to death in a bed of lilies at the Giardinetti Reali. Then the elegant, reputedly incorruptible British art collector Tony Roberts drowns in a canal, and French art philosopher Georges Bralle is discovered suffocated in his home in France. Affection blooms between Flavia and Jonathan as they probe current affairs and Titian's paintings for clues to the killings and the answer to a question about the painter's life. Pears, who has a doctorate in art history from Cambridge, writes with a Beerbohm-like wit. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This second title in a series maintains the high standards of the first ( The Raphael Affair , Harcourt, 1992), once again appealing to art history buffs. When a murderer strikes down an American member of the prestigious Titian Committee in Venice, General Taddeo Bottando of Rome's art-theft squad dispatches special assistant Flavia to gather information. What begins as a simple political mission becomes a dangerous quest for a missing portrait attributed to Titian. Enlisting the aid of art dealer Jonathan Argyll, Flavia never hesitates to call a spade a spade, but she tempers her judgment with theory. Most enjoyable. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Flavia di Stefano, junior investigator for the Polizia Art Squad of Rome, has been sent to Venice to assist (actually, to inoffensively not assist) the local carabinieri looking into the murder of American art historian Louise Masterson; Jonathan Argyll, the gawky British dealer's representative Flavia arrested in The Raphael Affair (1992), has come to Venice to negotiate for a mediocre painting with the Marchesa di Mulino, who suddenly turns skittish. The two cases cross with the news that Masterson's committee to authenticate all known works of Titian had run aground on serious disagreements (how serious? Two more committee members will soon be found dead) and that Masterson herself had developed a mysterious interest in the canvas Jonathan was trying to buy--part of the inheritance of the Marchesa's nephew Dr. Lorenzo, another member of the ill-starred Titian committee. As before, literate and cultivated, with a 20's (1520's) cast, and a particularly clever historical analogy saved for dessert.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
