Synopsis
Lovejoy's fling with a rich and adulterous fashion plate ends when she has him bounced from her show. He's caused an embarrassing ruckus by loudly protesting a dress sewn from a slashed-up (extremely valuable!) nineteenth-century Turkish carpet. He's broke again, homeless, and, to make matters worse, some sinister rival is beating him to every treasure he ogles at auction.
Despite attempts to involve him in a barely legal dating service and a thriving trade in fake Stone Age tools - and despite his new apprentice, the ladylike but luscious Lydia - Lovejoy Antiques, Inc., is going under. He's faced with having to choose between doing the right thing by helping his old friend Tinker search for a missing seventeen-year-old girl and doing what might be a lot more fun: accepting an enticing dinner invitation left in the pocket of his borrowed tux by a certain mysterious Olga Maltravers Featherstone. The invitation includes the magic word "money."
So Lovejoy sets course for London - and a breathless, witty, suspenseful mystery unfolds that will plunge him and Jonathan Gash's avid readers into the seductive, treacherous world of sex, antiques, high fashion, and the deep, muddy waters of murder.
Reviews
Fans of the lovably crooked antique "divvy" Lovejoy will doubtless rejoice at a new caper, while those unused to the convoluted comings and goings of the wily East Anglian con man will despair at the hopeless muddle that Gash has the gall to pass off as a plot in this 19th series entry. Lovejoy makes fun during a fashion show, and his newest lover casts him aside. Meanwhile, his business is sinking. Each time the slick thief spots a genuine find, another crooked soul beats him to the purchase. Is another "divvy" invading his territory? Affairs worsen as the lowly Lovejoy domicile is cordoned off by the gendarmes. Lovejoy is forced to offer his unique services in a chain dating enterprise, and he's grudgingly made master of ceremonies at a combined fashion show/antique sale. The antiques aren't much, but the valuable older dresses modeled by the sad-eyed anorexics soon have things heating up, especially when a good pal is murdered and a Molotov cocktail explodes a little too close to Lovejoy for comfort. All this is recounted in the breathless prose Gash has long and effectively employed. Little of it makes too much surface sense, and the only time the author lets up is to linger on a convoluted piece of antique lore, usually concerned with the fobbing off of a masterly forgery onto the unsuspecting public, a ruse as often as not masterminded by the never-modest Lovejoy himself. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Yet another chapter (the 19th) in the up-and-down life of Lovejoy--antiques expert supreme; magnet for attractive women; and dud at everything else (The Grace in Older Women, 1995, etc.). This latest installment finds him penniless, homeless, and mystified. Who's buying the underpriced, unrecognized treasures he has spotted before he can get to them? Even sodden old Tinker Dill, his longtime friend and barker, comes under suspicion, although Lovejoy continues to look for Tinker's runaway teenaged Australian niece Vyna. Meanwhile, Lovejoy's affair with fashion expert Thekla is over, but somehow he winds up back north, in his hometown near Manchester, running an antiques auction that's to be followed by Thekla's fashion show starring a procession of the local museum's priceless Victorian clothes. Along the way, Lovejoy discovers his old pal Spoolie (a vintage-film expert) murdered in his bathtub; almost gets charged with the bashing of hospitalized designer Viktor Vasho; and barely misses being wiped out by a firebomb hurled from a car. The untidy resolution to these puzzlers, and a dozen more, is frenzied, bloody, and near-nonsensical. The good stuff is history and antiques lore from Cro-Magnon caves to late Wesleyan chapels; lessons in scams and fakery; a string of picaresque characters, and Lovejoy's slangy, stream-of- consciousness style. Great fun in its inimitable, rollicking, often frustrating way--but not for everyone. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
That lecherous Lothario Lovejoy is at it again in yet another highly entertaining adventure involving murder, antiques, and beautiful women. This time, the setting is the world of high fashion, which is, for Lovejoy, a deeply perplexing arena where purple-tressed, sticklike girls parade down runways wearing mind-bogglingly ugly outfits made of metal, feathers, and--gasp!--a valuable Oriental carpet. Along with offending everyone he encounters at a fashion show, Lovejoy must deal with his failing antiques business and decide whether to help a friend find a missing teenage girl or join the mysterious Olga Maltravers Featherstone for what promises to be an evening of heady enchantment. Life is never easy for Lovejoy, what with juggling all those hot-for-him women, lusting after fire screens, figurines, and armoires, and unwittingly getting involved in tracking down vicious killers. With his usual wit and style, Gash offers up another hilarious tale featuring one of the most appealing eccentrics in crime fiction. The Lovejoy fan club grows by leaps and bounds! Emily Melton
Trying to save his beloved Lovejoy's Antiques, visited regularly by A&E viewers and readers of Gash's 18 previous best sellers, Lovejoy accepts a mysterious dinner invitation that appears in the pocket of his tux and heads for London-where murder is just around the corner.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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