Harmony In Flesh and Black
A Fred Taylor Art Mystery
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Nicholas Kilmer's Harmony in Flesh and Black exposes a deep knowledge of the sometimes tricky and treacherous haut monde of art dealers, collectors, and curators.
Smartly tailored, well-to-do Beacon Hill collector Clayton Reed has habits so refined that he doesn't even venture out to pick up his own acquisitions. He leaves that sort of work to Fred Taylor, a veteran of clandestine action in Southeast Asia who is presently working as Reed's factotum. A passionate noncollector, Fred researches possible purchases and fights for them at auction--but he is really more interested in his blossoming relationship with Molly Riley, an independent-minded Cambridge librarian.
In this series debut, Reed suspects that there may be a Vermeer painting worth millions lying underneath the oils of an unexciting nineteenth-century landscape. Tension mounts as he and Fred try to keep the vultures away and their hunch to themselves before auction. Meanwhile, Reed buys an unsigned nude smacking of 1890s Paris--it could be a Whistler, something he might have titled Harmony in Flesh and Black--from a down-and-out porno photographer who is soon afterward found murdered on the floor of his filthy studio. Their success depends on keeping a low profile, but now Clayton and Fred are in danger of being implicated in a very sleazy crime--which may at best jeopardize their plans to get the Vermeer, and at worst put their lives in danger.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First-novelist Kilmer launches a promising series with this darkly humorous story about a couple of art deals turned sour in Boston. Fred Taylor, whose job skills were picked up on clandestine operations in Southeast Asia, now assists a Boston art collector. By the time Kilmer is through acquainting readers with the cutthroat side of collecting (where acquiring a painting can literally be murder), Fred's career path makes sense. First Fred's boss, aesthete Clayton Reed, wants to pick up a mediocre landscape that may be a priceless painted-over Vermeer. Reed also picks up an unsigned nude, which may possibly be the work of a major painter, from a pornographer who is soon found murdered. The suspense builds after a slow start as the art-history sleuthing-which makes murder seem mundane-gains momentum. Kilmer's prose can be self-consciously highfalutin, but his characters are lively, the context makes for a stimulating change of pace and the plot is inventive in this excellent first effort.
