Theft in the Art World

The Promise of Happiness
Justin Cartwright

Cartwright's hilarious, despairing, rapier-sharp third book (Leading the Cheers) delivers a great deal of the absent titular emotion. The five members of the Judd family, reeling from a series of personal and professional blows, have each retreated into a private world. But the impending release of eldest daughter Juliet, an art historian incarcerated in an upstate New York prison for helping to sell stolen Tiffany windows, sets the plot, and the family, in motion. As Juliet, once the apple of her parents' eye but now the family's black sheep, drives to the city with brother Charlie, her father mulls his own professional disgrace, her mother looks to home cooking as a salve, sister Sophie continues to wean herself off drugs (and a married man) and Charlie, the rock of the family, has doubts about his impending marriage to a South American socialite. Each sees their efforts as 'the secretion of human folly,' but the novel retains a measure of hope for the very thing it despairs of: family. Happiness may be too much to ask for, but its chase, Cartwright suggests, can be at the best of times a family pursuit.
Publishers Weekly Review; November 2005.

The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
Chris Ewan

This impressive debut, a comic whodunit from British entertainment lawyer Ewan, owes much of its charm and success to its compelling antihero, Charles Howard. An established author of mysteries featuring a burglar-detective, Howard himself is a successful burglar. While finishing his latest novel in Amsterdam, Howard receives a cryptic invitation via his Web site and follows his curiosity to a meeting with a mysterious American who somehow knows of the author's secret profession. Howard initially declines the commission to steal two small plaster monkeys, but when he succeeds in his assignment, he finds his client has been brutally bludgeoned. After becoming a suspect, Howard scrambles to understand the link between the monkeys and a diamond heist over a decade earlier. The ease with which Ewan creates a memorable protagonist and pits him against a plausible and tricky killer will be the envy of many more established authors. The detection is first-rate, and Howard is a fresh, irreverent creation who will make readers eager for his next exploit.
Publishers Weekly Review; September 2007.

Museum of the Missing
Simon Houpt

Houpt is best known for his vibrant arts and culture column in Canada's Globe and Mail. This, his first book-length production explores the subject of art theft and its multivalent consequences, from its historical and ethical implications to the complexity of post-recovery restorations. It is one of the first books to cut such a wide and incisive swath across the subject, addressing everything from wartime looting and collector-initiated heists to the motivations behind other historically documented cases of art larceny. Each chapter contains three to four full-page, illustrated features that highlight thefts of exceptional infamy, profile the detectives and agencies working on art crimes, or provide a glimpse of the contemporary technologies employed to facilitate the recovery of stolen work. The concluding 'Gallery of Missing Art' serves as a visual reprise of the thefts discussed in previous chapters and offers a valuable record of many works still unaccounted for. Informative and insightful, this book is highly recommended for art history and cultural history collections. With a foreword by Julian Radcliffe, whose London-based Art Loss Register reunites stolen artworks with their rightful owners.
Library Journal Review; August 2006.

Artistic License
Julie Hyzy

Artist Annie Callaghan, on the verge of divorcing her grammar- challenged, on-the-make, burglar husband Gary, sleeps with him one last time and winds up pregnant, and even worse, saddled with him and his smelly pal Pete in her nice house. Still, some things are looking up. She's been hired to paint a mural in Sam Morgan's ice cream parlor, and when two bratty kids deface it, their mom, Gina DeChristopher, asks Annie to paint a dinosaur mural in the kids' playroom. Three floors down, the very wealthy Mr. DeChristopher has decorated his private study with purloined Fabergi eggs and a Durer etching stolen from Chicago's Art Institute and valued at ten million dollars. In typically dumb fashion, Gary and Pete naturally plan a heist that winds up with Gary dead, Pete on the lam, and poor Annie weeping all over nice Sam Morgan's shirt. Annie almost comes to a bad end when DeChristopher tries to get his goodies back, but not to worry: Sam to the rescue.
Kirkus Review; December 2003.

Chasing Cezanne
Peter Mayle

Mayle gets better with each book, creating even more inventive plots and fashioning even more delectable characters. In his latest wonderful novel, Andre Kelly does substantial freelance photography for Camilla Porter, editor of the splashy New York magazine DQ. Camilla sends Andre to the South of France on a particular assignment. With time to kill, he ventures to a local villa to pay his respects to the owner, but, instead, observes a Cezanne painting being removed from the premises. Curiosity aroused, Andre pursues the story and inadvertently gets himself involved in a complicated art-forgery scam. With the enlisted aid of his assistant back in New York and a sophisticated art dealer only too thrilled to be involved in such a delicious caper, Andre successfully circumvents all attempts to do him bodily harm and finds out exactly what is going on. And who turns out to be up to her exquisitely plucked eyebrows in the art fraud? DQ editor Camilla Porter herself. At once breezy and intelligent, Mayle's novel is absolutely pleasurable reading.
Booklist Review; May 1997.

The Man Who Stole the Mona Lisa

Robert Noah

Based on an actual 1911 attempt to steal the world's most famous work of art, this intricate, fable-like yarn concerns the Marquis de Valfierno, an urbane Buenos Aires swindler, and his partner in crime, a master painter who can only copy other people's work. After the duplicitous duo successfully steal and forge several prominent masterpieces in Mexico City, Valfierno sets his sights on the Mona Lisa. The plot acquires a romantic angle when the marquis marries a much younger Brazilian and finds himself providing for a family. Noah's (All the Right Answers) descriptions of the cat-and-mouse games of an art thief are consistently entertaining, but it's the elaborate fantasy atmosphere that makes the machinations work. The intriguing cast of secondary characters includes the young cripple who performs the actual thefts, the barber who organizes the marquis's affairs and the blackmailer who tries to capitalize on the loss of the Louvre's showcase piece. The decision to present the climactic theft before the final resolution robs the book of some momentum, but this charming tale should delight art lovers as well as readers who love a creative caper.
Publishers Weekly Review; September 2001.

The Pieces from Berlin
Michael Pye

This human drama unfolds as Nicolas Muller-Rossi, an elderly Swiss academic, attempts to attend his estranged father's funeral, only to be shunned by the deceased's second family. The reason? During World War II, his mother, Lucia, now a frail antiques dealer, used her mercenary charm to collect and sell the art treasures 'abandoned' by Jewish German residents. When a former neighbor passes by Lucia's store and recognizes a valuable table once held in her own home, it catalyzes the long delayed process of bringing Lucia's actions to justice. As Lucia's trial approaches, each character must grapple with his or her (often repressed) memories of the war. Pye fully fleshes out his characters, never allowing them to slip into easy stereotypes: Lucia is both a selfish flirt as well as an intelligent businesswoman who struggled against the constrictions society placed on her gender; Nicolas is a thoughtful professor as well as a frightened old man who selectively ignores key moments from his past.
Booklist Review; January 2003.

The Chrysalis
Heather Terrell

Attorney Mara Coyne's firm is hired by the venerable art-auction-house Beazley's to defend the ownership of 'The Chrysalis,' a seventeenth- century Dutch painting by Johannes Miereveld. The owner, who purchased the painting through Beazley's, is ready to sell, but Hilda Baum, whose parents died in the Holocaust, says the Nazis stole the painting from her family, and she wants it back. Working with Beazley's employee Michael Roarke, a former college classmate, Mara prepares the case, certain a positive outcome will guarantee her a partnership in her prestigious law firm. Then, when Mara finds some irregularities in Beazley's way of doing business, she works to unravel the truth-- perhaps at the expense of her career. Jumping between present-day New York City and Holland, both in the seventeenth century and during World War II, the story starts slowly but builds in intensity to an exciting climax. Rich details about the art-auction business and case law are woven throughout this fascinating debut.
Booklist Review; May 2007.