Portrait of an Unknown Woman

 

Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Daniel Silva  431 pp.

Gabriel Allon has retired from his job as head of the Israeli Secret Service and settled, with his family, in Venice. His wife, Chiara, is running Tiepolo Restoration Company while Gabriel does the art restorations. Soon he is drawn into a deadly investigation of the sale of art forgeries on a grand scale. To catch the forgers and unscrupulous dealers, Allon must become the world's greatest art forger and enter into the dirty side of the multimillion dollar art world. This book has all the action and intrigue of the previous novels without the political angle.

A Trick of the Light

A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny (2011) 339 pages

Another author and series new to me are Louise Penny and her 7th installment in the Chief Inspector Gamache mystery series. (Apparently I never start with the first book in a series.) Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his team investigate the murder of a woman found in the garden of Clara Morrow, a woman who'd just celebrated her first art show just shy of age 50. Three Pines, a small Canadian village, has a variety of residents and visitors who came to the party at Clara's home after her art show opening, which provides an ample number of suspects. It turns out that the murdered woman, Lillian, had been best friend to Clara in her youth, until Lillian's jealousy over Clara's artistic skills had turned toxic. The murder investigation is in itself fascinating. However, a backstory into a traumatic event in the not-so-long-ago past of Inspector Gamache and his second-in-command, Jean Guy Beauvoir, is also compelling. The character development rings so true. Penny's writing style forced me to slow down just a bit in order to appreciate her craft: those numerous times when a turn-of-phrase makes me wish I had such skills. A perfect read on a cold winter day...

Any Human Heart

Any Human Heart by William Boyd  512 pp.

This pseudo-autobiography of the fictional Logan Gonzago Mountstuart is written in the form of journals kept throughout his life. Mountstuart is an Englishman born in Uruguay to an English father and Uruguayan mother. His parents returned to England so that he could receive a "proper British education." Mountstuart leads an somewhat interesting life of serendipity, surviving Oxford with a mediocre degree, writing a few well-received books, serving in Naval Intelligence in WWII, dealing in fine art, and basically wandering from one thing to another with varying degrees of success. Throughout it all he drinks too much, womanizes, suffers personal tragedies, and really has no concept of money and much of the world around him. The only thing that kept me reading was my admiration of how well it is written. Mountstuart is a character you love to hate but Boyd's writing compels you to keep reading.