Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Fred Taylor, a Boston-based art expert who made his initial appearance in Harmony in Flesh and Black, returns to tackle another multifaceted crime. Art experts have made fine amateur sleuthse.g., Aaron Elkin's Chris Norgren or Elizabeth Peters's Vicky Bliss. Fred, low-keyed, blunt and sardonic, is an eccentrically nonmaterialistic sort employed by the rich and very acquisitive Clayton Reed. Despite his aversion to ownership, Fred has moved in with girlfriend Molly Riley and her preteen children, Sam and Terry, finding himself possessed of, and by, a family. Here, Fred buys a fragment of a mutilated painting he thinks might be an unknown (or unaccounted for) portrait by John Singleton Copley, an 18th-century American-born painter whose Tory leanings caused him to flee to England. Fred's pursuit of the rest of the painting leads to murder. Through Molly, Fred also becomes involved in the machinations of Eunice Cover-Hoover, a psychiatrist who blends talk-show appearances, pop-psych books and personal consultations about recovering repressed memories of abuse into a smooth and sinister con operation. In addition to rendering the art history (and Fred's research) interesting, Kilmer makes Cover-Hoover's predations on the psychologically fragile believable and frightening. These elements and healthy doses of humor and suspense keep the pages turning to the satisfying conclusion. (Aug.)
Library Journal
Patrick Cullen does an excellent reading of this surprisingly nonstuffy story involving the details of an 18th-century American artist, an unscrupulous, greedy therapist, a journalist only interested in ratings and shock value, and false accusations of satanic worship. Fred Taylor, a diehard noncollector who prowls Boston shops on behalf of a collector, finds the fragment of what appears to be the work of a famous artist in his old friend's antique shop. The search for the rest of the painting and the story behind its mutilation soon leads Fred into a tangled web of murder, violence, and intrigue. He's helped along by his housemate, a reference librarian. All in all, this most entertaining mystery keeps the listener's attention from start to finish. Recommended for mystery collections.Nancy Paul, Brandon P.L., Wis.
Kirkus Reviews
It isn't long after the harmless old gent who'd staked out his librarian lover Molly Riley's place turns up dead on the banks of the Charles that Fred Taylor comes on a much more appealing, though equally serendipitous, find in antique dealer Oona Imry's shop: a fragment of a painting that just might be by John Singleton Copley. Fred's employer, omnivorous art collector Clayton Reed, charms Oona into selling the handsomely painted squirrel at a man's feet, and Fred promptly goes hunting for the rest of the canvas. But the second third, though it's free for the taking, comes at a much higher price: Oona's pianist nephew Marek Hricsó gives it to Fred after semi-nude Oona's been ground under the wheels of a train. The lethal treasure hunt for the last third of the Copley (if that's what it is) is obviously tied in to the defunct stalker, and to the mumbo-jumbo malpractice of Satanic deprogrammer Dr. Eunice Cover-Hoover, who's been lurking equally portentously in the shadows of Molly's telephone from the word go. Watching Fred follow the trail from Copley to Satan—by way of Adult Rescue, Inc., a coven of the weirdest heavies you've ever seen outside the astral realm—stands in for the sort of mystery that would have you asking whodunit.
Fred remains as charming as in his debut (Harmony in Flesh and Black, 1995), and if the culprits aren't exactly the stuff of nightmares, they pack all the menace of good comic-book villains.
