A riveting and richly nuanced art-crime novel.
Matthiessen’s literary thriller centers around stolen artworks.
The story opens with a tense fictional recreation of the 2012 break-in at the Kunsthal art museum in Rotterdam, Netherlands, as a group of thieves hurries to steal priceless works of art before the museum’s alarms bring the police (“Shards of glass were everywhere, popping and cracking under their sneakers. He heard a far-off siren”). The thieves get away with some Monets, a Picasso, and a painting called “Woman With Eyes Closed” by a painter named Hochberg. The artist was a friend of 86-year-old George Clayton, so, naturally, news of the theft is a persistent topic of conversation among the Hamptons elites of Clayton’s artist community in Sagaponack, New York, where Clayton’s daughter, Perrin, lives with her rich husband, high-flying art-world star Jack Triplett. (“His works were in many international airports and the lobbies of major hotels.”) Drawn into this world by the crime is MI-6 agent Kit Hobbs, whose investigation into the possibility that a Russian dealer is involved in fencing the stolen artwork in Sagaponack brings him into contact with Perrin, who may be able to save Hobbs from the trauma that’s been eating away at him since an earlier mission went horribly wrong (when readers meet Hobbs, he feels as though he’s “dripping” with death and despair). By slow and steady degrees, Matthiessen takes all these familiar elements of the standard heist thriller and transforms them into something more. Readers who might initially feel that too much time is being spent focusing on the lives and relationships of the thieves, for instance, will find themselves increasingly fascinated by the author’s ability to bring all the disparate worlds of the narrative to vivid life. Just as Hobbs is drawn to Perrin (“the sound of her voice, her courage and her forlornness”), readers will be totally engrossed.
A riveting and richly nuanced art-crime novel.Pub Date: June 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781957607320
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Latah Books
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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