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French criminal investigator Michael Dalton and his American art professor fiancée, Jennifer Bowen, have been through a lot together. Some time ago, they lived through a murderous situation where Michael was terribly wounded and Jennifer saved his life. But now, the future is bright, as they are about to be married. Michael has inherited a fortune in art and property and plans to resign from the police business before his honeymoon. But that, alas, is easier said than done. A young girl's body washes up on the beach of a resort near Aix-en-Provence, and it turns out to be Caroline, the young daughter of close friends. Her back has been hideously marred through the application of nitric acid, and Michael must at least get the investigation started. No one realizes it at the time, but Caroline is the victim of the grand vision of an artist by the name of Garrett Lee Brant. Brant is a tattooist and severely disturbed individual from Venice, California, who believes that he communes with Paul Gauguin. It is his mission to create the ultimate art work, using the unblemished skin of young girls as his canvas. He and his wife, Eve, are aided in accomplishing this goal by a perverted Flemish photographer by the name of Jan Korteman. The girls are meant to be living montages of Brant's work; but as might be expected, things don't go as planned. Despite the horrible nature of the crime, Bogner does a good job in minimizing its gruesomeness. We spend more time in the head of Brant than we do in watching him create his "art". There is a full cast of weird and depraved characters‹Jan Korteman who has the wealth to pursue his lusts; Heather Malone, a rich American nymphomaniac who is obsessed with Garrett and has her body sculpted in the image of Pamela Anderson to be more alluring to him; and Eve, the wife who kidnaps the young victims for her husband. Bogner also does well with the "good" characters of Michael, Jennifer and their parents. The one problem with dealing with an insane and amoral character is that the author has to be cautious not to take the narrative too far into the realm of eccentricity, for the reader may find the total depths of weirdness too extreme. That is what happened here. The reader can accept Brant's conversations with Gauguin as a measure of his delusions. However, a revelation about Brant's identity at the conclusion of the book was just too over the top. Bogner does a fine job in depicting the French setting, both in the habits of its people and especially in its food. He's created a very readable albeit strange book which is marred by a finale that flew too far afield.
Reviewed by Maddy Van Hertbruggen, May 2003
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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