Crime book reviews: a triple treat for readers

‘Night at the Museum as reimagined by Michael Crichton and Stephen King’: A.J. Finn’s blurb for The Paleontologist is more helpful than most.

The Paleontologist is a thriller set in a decrepid natural history museum. Picture: Getty

Stories of art theft and recovery have a certain allure. The luscious cover illustration of The Engraver’s ­Secret promises flowery beauties and exquisite costuming in Rembrandt and Rubens-era aristocratic life and portraits. However, both the seventeenth and twenty-first century storylines of this art-theft novel take us to unglamorous sites of sustained effort and commitment, with romances starting in workplaces rather than the Archdukes’ (sic) court or a monarch’s palace.

 

Accept the disjunction and you’ll find this novel well worthwhile. It’s cleverly constructed, informative, engaging. Congratulations to first-time author Lisa Medved, an Australian living in The Hague, who first published her story in Dutch ­before amplifying it for an English-language version.

The seventeenth-century instalments set in Antwerp and London highlight finances, intellectual property rights, and art-making techniques. When allowed to visit Peter Paul Rubens’ house studio with her father, engraver Lucas Vorsterman, studious 12-year-old Antonia has little appreciation of professional rankings and resentments but reports what she sees and is told. Understanding accrues later.

As holder of “operating privilege”, effectively ownership of the copyright of his works, Rubens pays Vorsterman to make copies that can be duplicated and used in marketing to secure new commissions. The engravings are supposed to highlight Rubens’ style, not the style of his engraver. By 1621, though, ­Vorsterman is signing his engravings, presumably soliciting ­acknowledgment and better earnings.

A showdown with Rubens results in Vorsterman leaving his employment and Antwerp. According to Medved’s fiction, the piqued Vorsterman has earlier stolen seven of Rubens’ drawings of Pandora. It’s a theft Antonia does not learn of until years later when her father is dying: “You must promise me … never reveal where the drawings are hidden … No dishonour … for our ­family.”

The larger portion of Medved’s novel details a modern-day hunt for the hidden artworks by Rubens researcher Charlotte Hubert. When Charlotte examines a folio of maps drawn by Antonia after Vorsterman’s death, she finds cryptic clues to the ­location of “treasures” that were “removed” and that Antonia wishes to be restored to the descendants of the Master.

The father-daughter, love-shame, trust-mistrust themes from Antonia’s life recur in Charlotte’s experiences. There’s a relationship with her estranged father to be negotiated. And as her office mate at Antwerp University, historian Miles Thornton, becomes her assistant sleuth, Charlotte is wary of fully confiding in case he’s scheming to steal her academic discoveries.

Our other two books set in and around institutions are alike in the edginess of the protagonists and the oddness of their ­missions.

 

“Night at the Museum as reimagined by Michael Crichton and Stephen King”: A.J. Finn’s blurb for The Paleontologist is more helpful than most. Author Luke Dumas’s epigraph is apt too. Dumas quotes from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, conjuring up a “nameless and horrible monster” that at any ­instant might spring from the shadows. If you fancy scientific curiosities and scares, or you know a grown-up who’s still a dinosaur nerd, this book could be for you.

Aged just 31, Simon Nealy returns to his Pennsylvania hometown to become director of paleontology at a decrepit museum of natural history. “Dino boy,” the cleaner labels him. Simon’s chief aim is to right a wrong. When he was 10 and meant to be watching out for his six-year-old sister, he left her unattended in the Hall of Insects while he ran upstairs to the Hall of Dinosaurs. The girl vanished in the half hour Simon was away and remains missing. “Death always leaves traces,” Simon asserts. But where to look after 21 years?

Simon’s biggest workplace task is to oversee the preparation and assembly of the bones of Theo the theropod for display. With the dinos becoming distressingly animated, it’s an unnerving task not made any easier by the under-funded non-profit conditions.

Having left behind a broken same-sex relationship in Chicago, Simon is a lonely character prone to nightmares and blaming his mother. Sympathetic readers will feel for him as, helped by a bountiful and eccentric older woman, he struggles through to positive outcomes.

 

Bone Rites will appeal to fans of dark history and Victorian Gothic although it’s set in the early twentieth century. English author Natalie Bayley, now living in Sydney, presents an ­unusual story in good plain prose, maintaining suspense until the final pages.

The action is recounted in the first person by a young woman, Kathryn Darkling, who goes to Edinburgh in 1912 to study medicine with (real-life) surgeon and suffragist Elsie ­Inglis and finds she’s a natural at anatomy. In 1915, Kathryn learns her adored brother Freddie – aged 15 and supposedly safe at boarding school – has died at Ypres after falsifying papers to join up. Soon after, she shifts to a field hospital in France run by Scottish female medical workers. A similar hospital in Macedonia features in Gail Jones’ literary novel Salonika Burning.

While Kathryn’s days are filled with nursing duties, her nights are taken over by Freddie, who appears in dreams and apparitions claiming Kathryn let him die and challenging her to redeem herself. Remembering a book of spells, Kathryn conceives a mission to collect all of the bones making up a standard anatomical model. According to her magical thinking, once the skeleton is completely assembled Freddie will be resurrected. Amputations give her access to unwanted bones. Dissection teaching in Paris, after a year of post-war louche living, offers more opportunities.

In France and then England Kathryn moves from theft to killing to fulfil her love-driven mission, justifying her murders as payback for warmongering. After one of her killings, there are sensational reports of a fiend nicknamed the Vampire of Westminster; Kathryn prides herself on having inspired Conan Doyle’s 1924 story The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire.

A second stream of the action concerns Kathryn’s continuing longing for uncorseted fellow student Jessica, who has married. Whether Kathryn completes her skeleton, whether the law catches up with her, and how things go with her first love, I’ll let readers discover.