![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
(no subject)
THE BIG STEAL, by Emyl Jenkins.
Cover copy: Hoyt and Mazie Wyndfield were the sort of couple that everyone admired. Charming and elegant, they'd furnished their Virginia manor house, Wynderly, with beautiful antiques and rare treasures from their exotic travels. So it was natural that after their death Wynderly would become a treasured museum. But a burglary exposed more than simple theft.
Hired to assess the value of the broken and missing antiques, intrepid appraiser and amateur sleuth Sterling Glass finds that her job is more complicated than she'd anticipated. Why would this well-heeled couple have so many fakes among the extremely valuable antiques? Working her way through uncovered diaries, old receipts, and one hidden room after another, Sterling finds the plot - and the players - ever-expanding in this mystery of provenance and deception.
Gender of detective: female
There are no deaths in this novel.
("Everybody lives! Just this one, Rose, everybody lives!")
(...er, right, sorry about that.)
The sad thing is, I was disappointed. No murder. No big theft, despite the title: there's a little theft, which is what brings Sterling to the museum in the first place, and something deeper and older, which is what she discovers, but even that's not a clear-cut single theft. There are a couple points where I thought someone might die, but no.
The point to this novel, insofar as there is one besides antiques, is secrets - women's secrets, kept from habit or from duty or just from the delight of having one to oneself. It's an interesting topic, but not what I was expecting from the book. You know where you are with a murder. Secrets are trickier.
*
The sun's risen again. Let's see if I can persuade my eyes to do the same.
Cover copy: Hoyt and Mazie Wyndfield were the sort of couple that everyone admired. Charming and elegant, they'd furnished their Virginia manor house, Wynderly, with beautiful antiques and rare treasures from their exotic travels. So it was natural that after their death Wynderly would become a treasured museum. But a burglary exposed more than simple theft.
Hired to assess the value of the broken and missing antiques, intrepid appraiser and amateur sleuth Sterling Glass finds that her job is more complicated than she'd anticipated. Why would this well-heeled couple have so many fakes among the extremely valuable antiques? Working her way through uncovered diaries, old receipts, and one hidden room after another, Sterling finds the plot - and the players - ever-expanding in this mystery of provenance and deception.
Gender of detective: female
There are no deaths in this novel.
("Everybody lives! Just this one, Rose, everybody lives!")
(...er, right, sorry about that.)
The sad thing is, I was disappointed. No murder. No big theft, despite the title: there's a little theft, which is what brings Sterling to the museum in the first place, and something deeper and older, which is what she discovers, but even that's not a clear-cut single theft. There are a couple points where I thought someone might die, but no.
The point to this novel, insofar as there is one besides antiques, is secrets - women's secrets, kept from habit or from duty or just from the delight of having one to oneself. It's an interesting topic, but not what I was expecting from the book. You know where you are with a murder. Secrets are trickier.
*
The sun's risen again. Let's see if I can persuade my eyes to do the same.