Art Kills by
Eric Van Lustbader
hbk out July 03
Published by Orion
at £6.99
This is an extremely short hardback, of only 87 small pages of rather large
type, which can be read in under an hour, which seems a bit expensive at
£6.99. It is really a long short story, written in the first person, she being a
New York art expert who gets mixed up in an internecine feud within a
Mafia-type family, over a hitherto unknown Reubens. Double-crossing ends
in a lot of shooting and that's about it. In spite of the glowing plaudits on the
back cover ( presumably about other Lustbader books), I found the book
uninteresting and easy to put down..
Maybe it's nit-picking, but why do authors write about things of which they
know nothing? In one place the heroine says 'The worst thing I could do
now was hyperventilate and fill my body with carbon dioxide.' The whole
point of hyperventilating is to get rid of carbon dioxide!
Though the author has a long track-record, I found that in parts, the writing
seemed amateurish and I can't imagine why Orion wanted to bother with
such a mediocre offering.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
Art Kills by
Eric Van Lustbader
