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PICTURES
by Robert Daley
Quercus, March 2007
352 pages
12.99 GBP
ISBN: 1847240410


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Tony Murano is a has-been tennis star who is married to a member of a royal family in a small unnamed European duchy. He is to become the father to the royal heir. However, he is about to be disgraced in the public eye. A local scandal magazine has published pictures of him in the hands of another woman (who happens to be almost naked) days before his son is born.

Murano is shunned by the duchy as well as his wife, but his mother-in-law believes that there is something else going on. Something does not feel right so she goes over her husband's head and hires a private investigating firm in New York to find out what happened. She wants to know who took the pictures as well as the identity of the woman in the pictures.

Vincent Conte, a man with his own set of demons, travels to Europe to uncover the truth. He discovers that the photographs were just only part of the picture. Something bigger is going on and people are being killed for it. What Conte does in the next few days will determine his future, and it ain't looking pretty.

The one thing that you will find in most of Robert Daley's novels is that his stories are character-driven. Each character is carefully developed and you get the insight as to who they are and why they are doing what they are doing. This is true of Vincent Conte as well as the mystery woman in the Murano pictures. PICTURES would have been a great novel had the plot focused more strongly on them. It was really exciting to read this book for about the first two-thirds of the novel, but after that the book turned out to be a huge disappointment.

It gets to be fairly obvious what is going on when the first person in the so-called extortion plot is killed. It stopped being a serious book and became more of a screenplay for one of those popular detective shows from the 1980s. It turns predictable and formulaic with an ending that is just a bit too much. I guess Dorothy Parker said it best when it comes to my opinion of PICTURES: "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." I have the dent in my wall to prove it. If you need to read a Robert Daley novel try THE ENEMY OF GOD.

Reviewed by Angel L. Soto, December 2006

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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