Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece / Noah Charney

An art history whodunit? Hard to imagine, but this book often reads like a thriller. The Ghent altarpiece is one of the most stunning artworks ever created. Its unparalleled beauty and intricate symbolism also made it one of the most prestigious spoils of war throughout the centuries. Noah Charney describes the genesis of this wonderful work of art and then charts its precarious survival in spite of iconoclasts, unscrupulous caretakers, inept burglars, and foreign invaders.

The last part of the book documents Hitler’s effort to create a mega art museum in Linz with all the stolen booty from the Nazi plundering of Europe. In the final days of World War II, this priceless depository of art, including the Ghent altarpiece, was nearly destroyed in a salt mine in the Austrian Alps.

Stealing the Mystic Lamb is a bit of fascinating art history with a little Monuments Men thrown in.

Click here for an online link that shows the work in detail.

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Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

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