A coveted Monet still life is set to be sold off at a trendy New York City auction house. But the painting goes missing and the art dealer selling the work is found dead. Now it’s up to a husband and wife team of amateur detectives to solve the mystery of Dying for Monet. It’s the latest installment in author Claudia Riess’ art-history murder-mystery series. WSHU’s Culture Critic Joan Baum read it. Here's her review.
“Dying for Monet” is a clever title, especially if you pronounce the artist’s name with the accent on the first syllable: MONey. Though a Monet still life is at the center of the action here, people die for money in Claudia Riess’ fifth installment of her art-history murder-mystery series. As the news reminds us, so many movers and shakers in the art world today reflect what Riess calls “the dark side of fine arts commerce.” Even famous museums don’t know they’ve been had by sophisticated hucksters. As Riess’s narrative shows, forgeries get better, in response to advances in authentication techniques. Dying for Monet shows the ease with which well-heeled international criminals can manipulate auctions and gallery catalogues. The irony of such high-end crime is that much of it involves the work of artists like Claude Monet who were poor in their lifetimes and whose estates get nothing when crime is exposed. In today’s art market, money rules. Investment is the name of the game, over love of art.
Dying for Monet stars a loving couple from Riess’s earlier books – amateur sleuths Erika Shawn and husband Harrison Wheatley. The plot is a bit contrived, but the art lore is what engages. Erika’s an art magazine editor, Harry teaches art history. They love sleuthing and early in the book they get their prompt: the sales broker of a famous painting about to go on the auction block at an upstart auction house is found dead in the outside yard by Erika . But before this, something odd has occurred: a Monet, listed along with seven other Impressionist offerings, is suddenly withdrawn from the auction as it’s going on.
For some readers Erika and Harrison Wheatley may recall Dashiell Hammett’s madcap detectives Nick and Nora Charles, from the late 30s and 40s, though add a child instead of a dog in the modern mix. Dedicated to one another, Harry and Erika move with ease among their privileged set, police buddies, and government allies who move with them from book to book. Problem - they really don’t come to life especially as Riess spends a lot of time here on a complication for Harry. While he is in London, pursuing the investigation, he is assaulted one night and badly beaten to the point where he needs extensive orthopedic rehabilitation. Never fear, he conducts the pursuit from a wheelchair, including devising a clever sting to catch the criminal mastermind, leaving a lot of the upfront action to his courageous wife.
The hospital and medical details, however, are too extensive, though the book is redeemed by the sections focused on art history. A friendly librarian in Connecticut, for example, tells Erika about a group of artists who constituted the Cos Cob Greenwich art colony from 1890-1920. American Impressionists mainly, who promoted plein-air painting. “But of course you know that,” she tells Erika. Likely though WE didn’t. Nor did we likely know about Geneva Freeport and other so-called tax-free warehouses that store artworks and other valuables,. The Geneva, we learn, is the oldest and largest such facility, with an art collection alone valued at $100 billion. Riess sets her climax there as it becomes clear that the facility has come under “scrutiny” in the last few years for being complicit in criminal activity. For sure, though neither plot nor characterization in Dying for Monet is memorable, the instructive news-related aspects of this well-researched novel most certainly are.
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