An art dealer in his twenties, Jimmy LaGrange, is found
beaten to death in his apartment just after the find of his
life has been consigned to auction. Word spreads at a New
York auction house and two ladies, Coleman and Dinah
Greene, speculate sadly as to what could have gone wrong
and whether it had any connection to art. Coleman has a
problem: she runs a magazine called 'Art Smart', but many
of their ideas are being stolen by other titles. She
doesn't want to tell her cousin Dinah, who has her own
struggle to keep an art gallery open, and she fears the
leak is one of her two longest-standing staff members.
RESTRIKE refers to a fine art print, later than the first
edition. Dinah is well-versed in such matters and she
snaps up a couple of items at auction, the buyers from MOMA
and other museums having left after the star offering was
sold. But Dinah can't hide her trepidation at her lack of
trade, and her possessive husband doesn't want her to move
to a better location. A new print museum in town seems a
likely prospect and she tries to get an introduction to the
man who wants to open it. An advisor on fine art to the
police, Robert Mondelli, asks for a meeting with Coleman to
discuss the connection between the dead art dealer and her
gallery. Since Jimmy hadn't owned the valuable work he
consigned to sale, who did? Coleman has more questions
than answers, and the police think it was a date gone
wrong, but Coleman is sure that the timing of Jimmy's death
is too much of a coincidence.
There's lots of good detail about the middle-ground art
world; the prints by lesser-known women from the early
1900s which find buyers, the work of identification and
authentication when a discovery is made. The two Greene
girls meanwhile come across as very real women, picking
their way through the minefield of business and
relationships, saddened that two weeks after Jimmy's death
he has almost been forgotten by the fast-moving city
crowd.
The side issues keep us reading and the mystery deepens.
Reba White Williams has done a skillful job with this tale
and
the connections keep being made right to the end. RESTRIKE
is a detailed mystery for art lovers and people who enjoy
learning something new.
Money and murder go hand in glove in the rarified art world
of Reba WhiteWilliams's exciting first novel, Restrike.
Cousins Coleman and Dinah Greene moved from North Carolina
to New York after college to make their mark on the art
world: Coleman is the editor of an influential arts magazine
and Dinah is the owner of a print gallery in Greenwich
Village. But their challenges are mounting as one of
Coleman's writers is discovered selling story ideas to a
competitor and The Greene Gallery is in the red because
sales are down.
When billionaire Heyward Bain arrives with a glamorous
assistant, announcing plans to fund a fine print museum,
Coleman is intrigued and plans to get to know Bain and
publish an article about him. Dinah hopes to sell him enough
prints to save her gallery. At the same time, swindlers,
attracted by Bain’s lavish spending, invade the print world
to grab some of his money.
When a print dealer dies in peculiar circumstances, Coleman
is suspicious, but she can’t persuade the NYPD crime
investigator of a connection between the dealer’s death and
Bain’s buying spree. After one of Coleman’s editors is
killed and Coleman is attacked, the police must acknowledge
the connection, and Coleman becomes even more determined to
discover the truth about Bain. In an unforgettable final
scene,Coleman risks her life to expose the last deception
threatening her, her friends, and the formerly tranquil
print world.
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