False Impression
A gripping, globe-spanning art heist thriller from the international bestselling author
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4.3 • 8 Ratings
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- €5.99
Publisher Description
'Probably the greatest storyteller of our age' – The Mail on Sunday
Would you risk your life for a painting? Globe-spanning and truly page-turning, False Impression is a compulsive thriller from Jeffrey Archer, bestselling author of The Clifton Chronicles and the William Warwick novels.
The night before the attacks of 9/11, an older, aristocratic woman is brutally murdered in her country home. It takes all the resources of both the FBI and Interpol to deduce the motive for her death: a priceless Van Gogh painting. It takes a courageous, determined young woman – who was in the North Tower as the first plane crashed – to take on both sides of the law and avenge the woman's death.
After 9/11, Anna Petrescu is missing, presumed dead. But she is alive, and uses her new status to escape from America – only to be pursued across the world, from Toronto to London, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Bucharest. But it is only upon her return to New York that the mystery unfolds . . .
Why are so many people willing to risk their own lives and others to own the Van Gogh ‘Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear’?
'If there were a Nobel Prize for storytelling, Archer would win' – The Daily Telegraph
*Jeffrey Archer’s This Was A Man was an instant Sunday Times HB bestseller when it published in 2016.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Even though Archer (Sons of Fortune) grounds his international art-thievery thriller in the events of 9/11, this leisurely paced, tepid effort has a musty feel. It's September 10, 2001, and Lady Victoria Wentworth is sitting in spacious Wentworth Hall considering the sad state of family fortunes when a female intruder slips in, slashes her throat and cuts off her ear. The next day in New York, art expert Anna Petrescu heads to her job as art wrangler for wealthy magnate Bryce Fenston of Fenston Finance. The pair's offices are in the Twin Towers, and when disaster strikes, each sees the tragedy as an opportunity to manipulate a transaction scheduled to transfer ownership of a legendary Van Gogh painting, Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear, from the Wentworth estate to the larcenous Fenston. The initially intriguing character, hit-woman and ex-gymnast Olga Krantz, turns out to be too lightweight, both physically and fictionally, to garner strong interest in anything other than her deadly skills with a kitchen knife. Lord Archer has been busy for the past five years or so serving half of a four-year prison sentence for perjury and writing a series of books about his prison experience; his first novel in seven years disappoints.
