Synopsis
When five masterpieces disappear from a Cape Town villa, a burnt-out American journalist gets involved in unveiling one more scandal that turns out to be an international masterwork of subterfuge
Reviews
This intricate thriller by the author of The Harbinger opens with the theft of five art masterpieces from a villa near Cape Town. The real treasure, however, is not art but something presumably hidden in one canvas: a long-missing document detailing WW II crimes of several prominent Afrikaners active in the Broederbond, the nation's most powerful political organization. The search for the "missing sixth" soon involves Michael Meade, an American journalist and widower trying to resurrect his career in South Africa. He knows that various members of the Broederbond are eager to have the information for their own purposes, and that one of these, Gideon DeBruin, was responsible for Meade's father's death during the war. His desire for revenge is complicated by his growing attraction to DeBruin's daughter, Farrell. Aided by a pair of idealistic black journalists, Meade and Farrell wend their way through a maze of murder and deception, plots and counterplots until painstaking detective work leads them to Amsterdam and the truth about the missing papers. It takes a daring gamble upon their return to South Africa to see justice done. Close attention is required to keep track of all the developments, but the novel's unusual setting and memorable characters reward the effort.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The theft of five paintings from the house of a South African collector is the catalyst for a complex plot of murder, forgery, and political intrigue. Since he doesn't want to report the theft officially, the paintings' owner, Sir Cas Greyling, asks alcoholic Michael Meade, a once-glittering American reporter playing out his last chance, to track down whoever hired the four thieves and then killed them before they left the grounds. In practically no time, Meade has identified Greyling's houseguest Rita Hess for the theft and gallery-owner Farrell DeBruin's father Gideon, an inner-circle member of the spiderlike secret society the Broederbond, as the killer. But the further Meade looks, the more complicated the case gets. The most valuable of the paintings--a Vermeer that was the thieves' real target--was almost certainly a forgery. They didn't want the painting, but a mysterious document hidden inside it, something called the missing sixth dating back to the Nazi seizure of the Vermeer. And Meade and his allies--Farrell DeBruin and black South African reporter Cam Fazzie--get caught in a murderous, three-continent cross-fire between Gideon, who doesn't mind kidnaping both Meade's son Sean and his own daughter to keep up the pressure on Meade, and the Broederbond stalwarts who don't want Gideon taking over. Maybe a little too helter-skelter in its closing sections- -Graham (The Harbinger, 1988) has the extraordinary idea that Jerusalem's Western Wall would be an easy place to smuggle a bomb- -but richly, compulsively readable until its last surprising twist. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Why are five valuable paintings stolen from a secure villa and all the thieves slain? And why should an alcoholic journalist make the story a personal quest? Who are the Afrikaner Broederbund? Why is gorgeous Rita at the end of every blind alley? Humanity's reverence for Old Masters collides with white humanity's obsession with Nazism in this second novel by the author of The Harbinger ( LJ 7/88). The result is a hyperactive adventure set mostly in Cape Town with detours to Berlin and Israel. One of the most interesting contributions to the political suspense shelves is a pair of black South African journalists whose cunning judgment and skeptical patriotism illuminate the dark repression of that society. The secretive world of art collectors is energetically examined and a complicated maze of a plot laid out without benefit of brains-on-the-wall violence or sexual shenanigans. With extravagantly romantic characterizations, this is a solid, intelligent tale, only a tad too long; it definitely puts Graham on the track of thriller mastery. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/91 . -- Barbara Conaty, Library of Congress
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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