The Bernini Bust
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Clever Italian art-history crime series featuring scholar and dealer Jonathon Argyll, from the author of the best-selling masterpiece ‘An Instance of the Fingerpost’.
The hardest part of being an art dealer is having to sell your beloved works. For Jonathan Argyll, the pain is soothed when an American billionaire agrees to pay a vast sum for a relatively minor piece.
Arriving in the Californian sunshine eager to collect his cheque, Jonathan bumps into one of his less scrupulous colleagues, and discovers he is not the American's only seller. A bust of Pope Pius V is being smuggled out of Italy, and trouble is following in its wake.
Within hours, Jonathan's billionaire is dead and both the smuggler and his bust have gone missing. Thinking things can't get any worse, Jonathan calls for the help of the Italian Art Theft Squad – and instead finds himself the killer's next target…
Reviews
Praise for ‘The Bernini Bust’:
‘An elegant and amusing book, perfect for those who love a clever puzzle.’ Mail on Sunday
‘Delightfully pursued and narrated puzzle.’ Sunday Times
‘Iain Pears get better and better…frothy, fun and nicely plotted.’ Spectator
Praise for the Jonathan Argyll series:
'Superior entertainment.' Allan Massie, Scotsman
'There is nothing so satisfactory as the deconstruction of a puzzle in the hands of such an erudite and sure-footed author.' The Times
'Pears is a delightful writer, with a light, ironic touch.' Frances Fyfield, Mail on Sunday
'Iain Pears writes delightfully witty, elegant, well-informed crime novels.' The Times
'You don't have to know much about art to enjoy Iain Pears's Italian mysteries. Like a good teacher, he shares his passion unobtrusively and flavours his lessons with wit.' Val McDermid
'Pears is a delightful writer, with a light, ironic touch.' Mail on Sunday
About the author
Iain Pears won the Getty Scholarship to Yale University and worked for Reuters in Rome. He is the author of the bestseller ‘An Instance of the Fingerpost’. He lives with his wife and son in Oxford.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jonathan Argyll, Pears's ( The Titian Committee ) endearingly incompetent British art historian and art dealer in Rome, falls into a large sale of a lesser Titian--with a hitch: he must take the oil painting to the private Moresby museum in L.A. without so much as a down payment. The museum lives up to its nouveau reputation, having a collection without focus, a curator with grandiose plans and some Moresby family members with personal agendas sniping at the budget. Jonathan and amiable but dodgy art dealer Hector di Souza are invited to a party to celebrate Moresby's commitment to the Big Museum, otherwise known as ``the BM.'' As the acquisition of a lost Bernini bust of Pope Pius V is announced, di Souza is visibly distressed; moments later Moresby is dead and di Souza and the bust have disappeared. Jonathan calls his old love in Rome, Flavia de Stefano of the Italian National Art Theft Fund, to report on the smuggled and now missing bust and moments later just escapes being killed. Flavia, connecting the bust to an old war story involving some of the suspects, flies to L.A. and, joined by an Italian LAPD cop, tries to get Jonathan out of trouble, the killer in jail and the bust back to Roma. With sharply etched characters and art world lore, Pears's latest tale is a lark in grand British style.
