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First published in the U.K. in 1998, Ironside"s solid thriller provides an intriguing look at the contemporary art world. London art historian Nicholas Ochterlonie, while returning one evening to his late mother"s flat, where he"s lived since his divorce, rescues a woman from an apparent street mugging. The victim turns out to be his next-door neighbor, Julian Bennet, and the two soon become lovers. Ochterlonie is sure that the assault wasn"t random and that a threat still looms. Meanwhile, he creates controversy with his growing and increasingly vocal suspicions that a famous Vermeer portrait has been misattributed to the painter. The plot thickens when a police officer from the fraud squad stops by to ask about the real owner of Bennet"s apartment, a shady Russian businessman. Ironside ( A Very Private Enterprise) does a good job of making her not-entirely-sympathetic lead accessible. (Dec.)
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Two tales of deception—involving the authenticity of a Vermeer painting and the operations of the Russian mafia—are intertwined in Ironside’s tales (following A Good Death, 2009). At the center of both plot threads is London historian and psychologist Nicholas Ochterlonie, who is staying in his late mother’s flat after his wife unexpectedly leaves him. Assisting in what seems a random mugging, he meets his neighbor, the strikingly beautiful Julian Bennet, with whom he is soon sexually obsessed and sharing living quarters, despite her lingering feelings for her former Russian lover. Julian first assists Nick in gaining documentation about the provenance of the Vermeer painting Lady in a Pelisse displayed in a London foundation, then reveals her past with Harvard-educated Anatoli Voskresensky and his banking cohorts, the old-style Uzbek Dyadya and the whiz kid Igor. An accomplished and stylish character study, yet oddly short of passion and suspense for a story dealing with obsession. --Michele Leber
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