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BRUSH WITH DEATH
by Hailey Lind
Signet, July 2007
336 pages
$6.99
ISBN: 0451221796


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

After spending her 17th birthday in a Paris jail, nabbed for art forgery, Annie Kincaid has come to San Francisco to set up a legitimate art business. Her rascal grandfather, master art forger Georges LeFleur, is never totally out of the picture, as he flies around Europe, one step ahead of Interpol.

Annie has been hired to restore pictures in the Chapel of the Chimes at California's Bayview Cemetery. There she meets Cindy Tanaka, a Berkeley grad student who is studying public mourning through the centuries. Cindy raises the issue of a painting by Raphael from the Italian Renaissance, La Forinaria, the little baker girl, which may have been a portrait of his mistress. There are two possible copies, as well as the original, a 19th century copy and a recently produced digital copy. Has the digital copy been substituted for the original or for the 19th century copy?

Cindy's dissertation adviser reluctantly gives Annie the student’s address. When Annie finds her, Cindy is dead. There are two other attempted murders – a charming elderly woman who worked at the cemetery for years and whom Annie befriends; the woman is left to die of a diabetic coma. Next is Russell, a young man who also works at the cemetery and who is almost killed by a bee sting, something to which he is highly allergic.

Annie is by turns charming and infuriating and often not entirely realistic. She dives into a dumpster in search of clues. I would think that any sane person would head for the shower, but she continues to drive around town smelling like a sewer. She is ambivalent about the three men in her life, Josh who is working on a construction project for which Annie is a consultant and whom Annie plans to dump (nothing ever comes of this); Frank DeBenton, her landlord, who is conveniently in the business of transporting precious artwork, and the nefarious Michael X Johnson, art thief extraordinaire, who has sworn to Annie that he is now truly in the legitimate work of returning stolen art. Annie's back-and-forthing among the men is really tiresome.

The pace keeps the reader engrossed, but I sometimes felt my head spinning at the possible venues at which the three Raphaels could be found. There are also too many references to Annie's most recent adventures. To keep track, one would have had to read the other books yesterday.

Reviewed by Mary Elizabeth Devine, August 2007

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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