These Gabriel Allon books continue to deliver. The Heist was a bit slower than the last installment as I thought the two distinct story lines were a bit too far apart, but I really love Silva's ability to weave together history, art, and current events.
The Heist begins with Gabriel in a church restoring an altarpiece. It's a wonderful shake back to those first Allon novels which found him doing the same thing. He's living in Venice, now with a pregnant Chiara and you can feel like, although he's back in this space, it's more of a last goodbye as he contemplates becoming Chief of The Office.
But it seems his friends just can't stay out of trouble. His friend Julian Isherwood has stumbled on a dead body and of course Gabriel is asked by his friend in the Art Squad to take a look on behalf of the Italian Carabinieri. Gabriel discovers that the dead man was actually a stolen art dealer. Gabriel is asked to follow the trail of stolen art to find a missing Caravaggio, the Art Squad's number one target.
What Gabriel discovers is that Bashar Al-Asad, the Syrian president, has been commissioning art thefts in order to create portable wealth should his regime topple. Not satisfied with a few recovered paintings, Gabriel uncovers a vast network of wealth tied to "Evil Incorporated." To infiltrate the network, Gabriel must call upon a female bank manager - a child of Syria and herself a victim of the regime.
And of course he needs his team and some things don't go according to plan. The stakes don't seem too high for Gabriel in this one, we're not ever worried for his personal safety, but it is interesting seeing him undertake an operation with the understanding that the entire show will soon be his responsibility. He's going to be a father soon after all.
3.75/5 Stars.
This was a slightly different take for Kinsey. X is the combination of three separate mysteries. First, a woman asks Kinsey to track down a son she put up for adoption who has just been released from jail. Second, Pete Wolinsky, who died in the last novel as part of a bribery scheme, has left a coded message of names of women. Third, two elderly neighbors with suspect motives have moved in next door to Henry. The three mysteries are completely unrelated, but all happening simultaneously. The mixture of issues helps to move the book's plot along, especially where it might have petered out in singularity. None of the three mysteries is quite enough to make a novel-length story of its own. It's nice to see Kinsey not quite so hard up for money, but it's equally disturbing seeing her throw around money on hotel rooms all the while knowing she's not getting paid. Her one paid gig in the entire book is over and done with in the first couple chapters. Otherwise she seems to be on the verge of unemployed. I received X a while ago on NetGalley in exchange for a review. I fully intended to make it through the earlier novels faster, but it just wasn't to be. Surprisingly though, after so many books following once character, Grafton continues to put out consistently readable and entertaining material. Perhaps she never expected to make it this far. X isn't for anything in this one. It just simply is.
3.5/5 Stars.
This book had some issues, but all in all, it was kind of a fun look at art forgery and the world of struggling artists. Claire Roth is down on her luck. She's an artist, but some (slowly revealed) drama from her past has kept her from making it big in the cutthroat art world. She now divides her time between painting for herself, teaching an art class at a boys juvenile detention center, and copying masterworks for a company called Re-Pro, who then sells the oil painted copies for thousands of dollars. Enter Aiden Markel, the owner of an art gallery in Boston called Markel G. He has a proposition for Claire, he wants her to copy Edgar Degas' After the Bath V (there is no After the Bath V - it was created solely for the purpose of this novel) which was stolen in the infamous art heist from the Isabella Gardner Museum in the 1990s. During the heist, thieves dressed as cops stole 13 priceless works from the Museum, including Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee. None of the paintings have ever been recovered. Having recently finished (and loved with every fiber of my reading body) The Goldfinch, I was prime for more art thievery. So Markel tells Claire that once the painting is copied, Aiden will sell the copy to an unsuspecting buyer who believes he's buying the real thing, and then will return the original to the museum. He also promises Claire he will give her a one-woman show at his gallery, and will pay her $50,000. Being desperately poor, Claire agrees. However, once she begins to study the painting, Claire begins to suspect that it's not a Degas at all - that the painting is a copy of the original. In the meantime, Claire and Aiden begin sleeping together and then... well... these two are the worst criminal masterminds every, so naturally their story begins to unravel.I'm not sure if the audio narrator just ruined Claire for me, but there were so many things I didn't like about Claire. First of all, everything she says is so dramatic and breathy (okay could be a narrator issue). Second, she's kind of an idiot. Her big secret from the past, is that when her more famous professor/boyfriend gets artist's block, she paints something for him to get him over his hump and then he enters it into a competition, which he wins. He receives fame and fortune based on the painting and breaks up with Claire. She's so distraught because of the "fraud" (hmmm suspect), that she urges him to come clean. When he doesn't, she tells the museum curator that she painted the famous painting. She's not believed, and then she's blackballed from the art world. So here, she's being asked to partake in a criminal conspiracy and inevitably she what? - Yeah she thinks everything is going to be okay by coming clean. Like I said, she's kind of dumb. And you know what? She is guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud, but somehow she doesn't see it that way. She thinks she can outsmart Museum directors, FBI agents and the press. I don't think it really works that way. Also, the "love" between Claire and Aiden I wasn't really buying either. I mean, I was okay with their sleeping together and what not, but Claire mentions several times she knows nothing about Aiden. I wasn't ready to jump on the "but then I fell in love with you" bandwagon. Lastly, there are these letters from Isabella Stewart Gardner to her niece Amelia which are meant to give the reader some added insight (you'll get the punchline of the book FAR FAR before Claire - remember she's a sweet dumb dumb), but they come off overly flowery and over the top. Anyway, this gets three stars because I was entertained, but there were some points where I had to shut off the recording and forget how much I was annoyed by Claire before turning it back on. The best parts were the sections about historical forgers and how technically art forgery is done.
3/5 stars.
This is a book for readers. Correction, this is a gift for readers. For those who love escaping in the pages, and find themselves caring deeply about the characters who are revealed within them. This is a gift. A big, heart thumping, book so real you can feel it gift.
That The Goldfinch won a Pulitzer Prize is not a surprise to me. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. It's a finely crafted, gracefully written, surprisingly accessible piece of masterwork fiction. I have a suspicion it may just be the best book I'll read this year.
The story follows Theo Decker, a young teen whose mother is killed in a horrible terrorist attack. In the midst of the attack at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Theo escapes the grisly scene with a copy of Fabritius' The Goldfinch (you can read more about the painting here). A 1654 masterpiece whose story and description were lost with time, as Fabritius himself, and much of his other works were destroyed in a fire at his studio.
As a reader, we know only what Theo knows. We are shown the world through his eyes, and Tartt does a magnificent job telling us only what we need to know. She doesn't over explain, she doesn't extrapolate. We can think outside Theo's sphere, but not because the author herself has made any attempt to add in a narrator's interpretation. So there are some details of events in the book that seem so limited, but in a way, perfectly true to the story and the world created through Theo.
Theo is a flawed character, and I loved him the better for it. I never felt he was out of opportunities to make his life better, to overcome his trauma and the short shrift he was given in the life department. And Theo himself is aware of all this as well. It's like sharing in on a good friend's shame, and loving him despite all of it.
There are so many twists in Theo's life, but Tartt knows just when to cut ahead in time and save us some of the banal sorrow that would have drug the piece down into tedious pace.
5/5 Stars.
