Jeannette de Beauvoir's "The Fine Art of Deception: A Provincetown Mystery" is the ninth finely crafted book in the Provincetown Mystery series, but it is a complete stand-alone work in itself.
Whether you have any knowledge of art or not, this is a must-read. You'll find yourself thrust into the murky, high-stakes world of art fraud. But don't expect de Beauvoir to follow the usual mystery series formula. Instead of beginning the book with a dead body, she begins with a nightmare, a subtle indication that things are not as they seem and won't be easy to figure out.
The body doesn't show up until more than 100 pages later. So, who's to say whether a crime has been committed at all, until Sydney Riley takes on the case.
The likable and well-developed young character Sydney Riley, an events planner and amateur sleuth with a probing mind and a wicked sense of humor, never fails to win the hearts of readers. Her life-like personality makes the book a lot of fun to read.
An intriguing literary device de Beauvoir employs is the ongoing soliloquy (or is it a dialogue?) of private thoughts running in Sydney's head as she coaches herself through the investigation.
The author achieves this very smoothly by writing the book in the first person from Sydney's perspective, while Sydney recounts the story by telling us what she said, quoting herself as if the story were in the third person. The effect is that we are privy to her unfiltered internal commentary, which proves to be fertile ground for much of the comedy throughout the book.
Plus, Sydney's interactions with Mirela, a talented Bulgarian painter who works in the local gallery, add a welcome layer of interest as humorless Mirela helps Sydney unravel the mystery, sometimes bringing her child along with her. But although Mirela is interesting, she may not be altogether forthcoming.
"No one with a child has a sense of humor," Mirela explains. "They remove it."
Much amiss
When an art broker is suddenly hit crossing the street in quiet P'town, a once-rare cause of death that is dramatically on the rise, the community quickly realizes the woman has been murdered and something is very much amiss.
In the author's note at the end, de Beauvoir writes, "As you can probably tell, I'm fascinated by the extraordinary amount of fraud present in the art world, and by how it's done. Most of the players/places referenced in this novel — Myatt and Drew, Han van Meegeren, the Knoedler Gallery, the Geneva Freeport — are real, and the FBI does indeed have an active art fraud division."
The author goes on to explain the facts of the biggest and most puzzling art heist ever. In 1990, in the middle of the night, 13 paintings now valued at approximately $500 million (including renowned paintings by Rembrandt and Vermeer) were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and have never been found.
The intricate conspiracy to defraud the museum guards and pull off the robbery was immortalized in the film "This is a Robbery: The World's Biggest Art Heist."
Meanwhile, de Beauvoir explains, despite huge improvements in the tools used to detect fakes, even the experts sometimes have great difficulty discerning which paintings are the originals, as when a prestigious New York gallery sold a replica for $80 million. To add insult to injury, the signature of the artist was mockingly misspelled.
"Who wants to be known as the gallery that bought a fake Degas?" de Beauvoir writes, especially when reputation is what matters most in the art world, money is being made, and life floats along as if everything were just fine on the surface. But turning a blind eye is self-sabotage.
As more people defect from the face-value crowd, no longer believing everything they are told when clues indicate the contrary, we may want to do what Italy does with its great art. Long past quibbling about conspiracy theories, Italy knows it has a real conspiracy problem. Their solution: replace all public art in advance with top quality replicas so that nothing truly valuable is stolen.
"The Fine Art of Deception: A Provincetown Mystery" is very much worth reading for the education you'll receive about the "spectacular contradiction at the heart of art forgery." But brace yourself for the book's explosive ending, as all is revealed and justice prevails in P'town.
'The Fine Art of Deception: A Provincetown Mystery,' by Jeannette de Beauvoir, Homeport Press, $15.99 www.homeportpress.com
www.jeannettedebeauvoir.com
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