Lazarus Arise: A Fred Taylor Art Mystery (Art Mysteries) - Hardcover

Kilmer, Nicholas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1890208809 ISBN 13: 9781890208806

Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press, 2001

Synopsis

“This is very funny stuff, clever in its details and merciless in its satire... Irreverent . . . witty . . . the erudite but down-to-earth Fred is a treasure.” —New York Times Book Review

Arriving from Paris in Boston’s Logan airport, Fred Taylor, agent for eccentric art collector Clayton Reed, unwittingly grabs a smuggled treasure flung into the air by a dying passenger.

Not until much too late does Fred understand that the treasure — a medieval work of art whose subject is Lazarus — is in his hands. And now he must undertake to discover the identity of the work, as well as of its smuggler and its rightful owner. At the same time (for word gets out, and fast) he must fend off the increasingly aggressive attentions of both institutional and private collectors—not least among them his own employer Clayton Reed.

Fred’s search leads to an encounter with the life work, and the sudden death, of the self-proclaimed subversive landscape artist Jacob Geist. During five days of golden autumn, the race to identify, and to account for the treasure, takes us back six hundred years, through the blood and torment of this century to the treasure’s origin during the Hundred Years War. Throughout we are haunted by the seductive sweetness of the prevailing genius of Jacob Geist.

As usual, Kilmer delights in skewering the pretensions of the art world while constructing a brain teaser.

“Kilmer’s artful depiction of local color puts him in a category with the early work of Robert B. Parker, whose quick word pictures of people and places captured New England character.”—Boston Herald

“A deft and compelling use of historical crimes that mirror the felonies in decorous present-day Massachusetts vaults Fred’s fourth adventure (Dirty Linen) up into the league of Iain Pears’s art-history whodunits. —Kirkus Reviews

Fred Taylor’s four previous art mysteries (Henry Holt) are published in paperback ($14.95 each) by Poisoned Pen Press: Harmony in Flesh and Black (1-890208-47-7); Man with a Squirrel (1-890208-39-6); O Sacred Head (1-890208-48-5); Dirty Linen (1-890208-53-1).

About this title

About the Author:

Nicholas Kilmer, born (1941) in Virginia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Normandy, France. A teacher for many years, and finally Dean of the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he now makes his living as a painter and art dealer. In 1964 he married Julia Norris, and with her has four children.

From Publishers Weekly:

This fifth novel in Kilmer's (Dirty Linen) Fred Taylor series about artists and their rarified world could, like Lazarus, use a little resurrection. It takes a potentially fascinating story and turns it into a confusing and occasionally boring tale of a painter who drops dead at Boston's Logan airport on arrival from Paris. By chance, Fred, a buyer for wealthy art collector Clayton Reed, whom he's meeting in Boston, disembarks from the plane right behind the dead man, who turns out to be eccentric artist Jacob Geist. Fred accidentally picks up Geist's Paris newspaper from the concourse floor. When he arrives at Reed's digs, he and Reed discover a painting secreted between pages of the paper. It looks like a page from a medieval bible, depicting Lazarus arising from the tomb. Reed calls in an art antiquities expert to vet the painting's history, while Fred, the accidental detective, does his best to find out the identity of the painting's owner. Fred's search proceeds in herky-jerky fashion, with able assistance from his lady friend, Molly Riley, a reference librarian and one of the book's bright lights. Despite some good turns of phrase and the Boston setting, the author fails to develop the kind of fluid plot or solid characterization that, say, Robert B. Parker does in his Spenser novels. Artists or art historians may be enthralled, but straight mystery lovers will likely be disappointed by the lack of thrills and substance.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1890208809
• ISBN 13: 9781890208806
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200