Genre:
Crime
Description:
The
crime at the bottom of this mystery actually took place. The Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston exists and works of art, including
the paintings the book speaks of, were stolen from it in
the small hours the day after St. Patrick’s Day, 1990. There art
and life diverge: the real stolen paintings have never been
recovered.
The
fiction is partly a ‘what if’ about what might have happened to
the art and how it might have been retrieved. But it is also about
the sort of odd-ball who might have found the missing art.
The
blurb claims the book “is a fast-paced, wily whodunit filled with
intrigue, romance and stimulating scholarship,” which sounds pretty
accurate to me. The blurb continues: “Author, Kameel Nasr, an
international adventurer and art connoisseur, shines a penetrating
light on the motives, habits, and sometimes less-than-noble
intentions in the demi-monde of world-class art collecting. Along the
way, he’s created a wonderfully satisfying mystery novel for anyone
interested in historical fiction. The
Museum Heist
takes you on a roller-coaster ride of suspense, a meticulous portrait
of the underbelly of the art world at its highest echelons.
Author:
Kameel
Nasr was
born in Lebanon and emigrated to the USA as a child – since when he
has turned his hand to very many spiritual, physical and creative
pursuits. He describes himself as “an ebullient and upbeat New
England writer, adventure cyclist, dancer, spiritual seeker, amateur
astronomer, social activist, and patron of art and music. Over
the past 25 years he has produced books and articles on cycling,
international politics, early Christianity, and a Boston Cozy Mystery
Series [of which this book is part]. His works have been published in
several formats and languages and been cited in numerous articles and
journals.”
See
more about Nasr at his website.
Appraisal:
This
book is the first ‘Lieutenant Lowell mystery’, published in
August 2015. (A second book in the series - The
Symphony Heist: A Tale of Music and Desire
has been published recently.)
Nasr
riffs delightfully on the real news story (the theft from the
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston),
producing a fantasy of increasing complexity. He mingles
investigations into art fraud, forgeries and art thefts with rich
information about artworks, known and lost, of the Classical world.
Although
this is supposed to be Lieutenant Lowell’s mystery, Nasr’s main
protagonist is one ‘Paris’, who lives his life according to
Pythagorean principles, following the philosophical tenets of the
Greek Classical world, their heroes and heroines, and their pantheon
of gods. This develops, inter
alia, into an interesting
debate about pantheism and monotheism, which led me to ponder on the
differences between the rational and the animal mind.
You
may throw up your hands at this point and say that all this sounds
like heavy going, but the way Nasr treats his subject matter you can
begin the book knowing nothing about any of the above, romp along
enjoying the story and emerge at the other end knowing considerably
more about high art (its collections, forgeries and thefts) and
Pythagoras’s Classical Greek world than you ever thought you would
– having acquired the information as painlessly as you might
consume Greek yoghurt.
So
this is a book that is more than a crime novel, and certainly more
than the ‘cozy mystery’ that Nasr claims it to be. It is a
fascinating and sophisticated puzzle. If you enjoy historical
fiction, and/or have a working knowledge of some of the better known
Greek stories, e.g. Odysseus’s journey home to Penelope, Orpheus
and Eurydice, Helen of Troy and Paris, this will certainly help you
to get the most out of the analogies drawn between those tales and
the goings-on in this modern heist novel. But lack of that knowledge
is no barrier to enjoying the book.
And it
has more to say about the human heart and that organ’s motivation
than your average crime novel would be interested in.
Oh
yes – Lieutenant Lowell does have a considerable role in the book.
And his own foibles too. His ‘gut’ is as prominent in the
investigation as that of Leroy Jethro Gibbs, if for rather different
reasons.
This
book is unusual in its subject matter; a bit like Paul Adam’s books
about long-lost, priceless violins, but without the murders. If that
is your sort of thing, then hie thee to the Classical world without
more ado.
FYI:
The
book is written in the present tense. This gives a sense of urgency
to events and for some reason which I can’t quite put my finger on,
imparts a pleasing ingenuousness to the character of ‘Paris’.
However, it is a tense which can get wearing over the course of a
novel-length read. Fortunately, this is not a long book. Of course,
from time to time the author needs to look ahead or behind and, in
the file I was working on, such time shifts were not secure which
meant the reader had to spend a few minutes working out ‘when’
she was rather than getting on with enjoying the story.
Format/Typo
Issues:
There
were many
of these issues in the file I was working from. A scan through an
Amazon sample indicates that at least some of these (particularly the
more irritating, running oddities) have been fixed. Why would an
author seeking positive words about his published opus send a file
full of errors to a reviewer? Why indeed.
The
infelicities above had to lose the book a star.
Rating:
**** Four Stars
Reviewed
by: Judi Moore
Word
Count: 65-70,000
words
No comments:
Post a Comment