By Jane Davis
Special to THE DAILY

Prepare yourself for a wild race from Rome to Paris to London where paintings go missing, are stolen, recovered, lost again and recovered — or are they? Author Noah Charney is completing a doctorate in art theft and has pulled together fact and fiction to create this first novel. It can best be described as uneven. There are brilliant chapters and others that are bewildering, while still others seem to be lifted from the pages of art journals. Some are simply pedantic.

A Caravaggio is stolen from a church in Rome, a Malevich goes missing from a Paris gallery and a prize acquisition for a London museum is whisked away before it is even insured. Gabriel Coffin is the man to call. He is an expert in recovering stolen art, working with both the police and insurance companies and ever willing to act as go-between or consultant in the cause of stolen art.

He remains enigmatic with only hints of his motives and brilliance, even until the end of the book when one expects to finally know “whodunit” and why. This is frustrating, as is the cliffhanger chapter style when the reader must wait for answers for several questions — each only partially revealed a few pages farther on. This leads to confusion, as there are so many threads of the story, some of which are wound up, while others remain unraveled.

The description of a Christie’s art auction is quite fascinating, but some of Coffin’s lectures on famous art heists or the psychology of the art thief are rather dull, perhaps because they are standard fare in most art texts. There are some excellent discussions of iconology on some of my personal favorite pieces of art, but again, they are not really new, which is possibly why he presents them as part of an introductory lecture by a professor leading his students through the London National Gallery.

The reader should be warned it is helpful to have copies of the works mentioned in the novel in order to appreciate some of the plot twists.

Charney should decide if he wants to develop character or write a heist story since he does neither completely. This could be chalked up to his academic background. Please, a little more why and a little less maybe.

In some ways this would make a better movie than a book, since some of the characters seem to be hiding secrets that could be easily explained by a quick scene — even one without dialogue. As it is, the reader has only frustration in many cases. The last chapters when all should be revealed seem at first to be explained, but upon reflection too much is circumstantial and credible only in a work of fiction. Too many questions are not only unanswered but not even asked. What a shame. I had great hopes of history, art and mystery and instead got a muddle like a watercolor with too damp a background.

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