The Bottom Line: This high-stakes, meticulously researched international art heist caper is pure gold.
Larry Witham’s art crime expert Julian Peale is back on the case in an engrossing tale with significant geopolitical consequences. The novel opens in Vienna, as a Swiss art agent fronting a company called Silk Road Company purchases 26 paintings – including works by Degas and Monet – from a local nobleman whose estate is in decline. After a quick transfer in Budapest, the collection is then whisked off to China.
Cut to Washington D.C., where private investigator Joseph Castelli – America’s first “art cop” – receives a phone call concerning the very same collection. It seems that at least one of the pieces may have come from the so-called art heist of the century at Boston’s Gardner Museum in 1990. The case has been a black eye for the FBI ever since, and now that a lead has finally surfaced, the Department of State and the CIA are hoping that Castelli can locate the missing art – but be quiet about it.
Naturally, Castelli taps Julian Peale to work the case. Author Larry Witham delivers a stroke of genius by pairing Peale with Grace Ho, an independent operative working directly for the government. Considerably younger than Peale, and engaged to be married, Ho is a Marine-trained resident of Northern Virginia and second generation Chinese American. Her cover is that of a visiting Chinese language lecturer and martial arts instructor.
The stark juxtaposition in expertise and approach between the two investigators creates an amusing friction that builds over time. As the pair tracks down leads and contemplates possible tactics, the typically self-assured Peale is hilariously insecure at times (“…like contestants in a quiz show, he an Old Father Time and she a Young Turkess….but only she was scoring the points”). Eventually, on the topic of whether they should travel to China, he actually informs her that he’s going to “pull rank” before once again ceding to her point of view.
Credit Witham for knowing just when and how to unleash Ho’s martial arts expertise. After several fascinating procedural investigative chapters, one could be forgiven for thinking The Silk Road Affair would be a John Le Carre-esque scavenger hunt for explosive secrets without so much as a single explosion. Fortunately, Peale and Ho – who are armed, respectively, with a taser disguised as a black shaver and pepper spray in the form of a deodorant container – do indeed find themselves in mortal danger, and very much in need of Ho’s fighting skills.
Witham’s gift for delivering engrossing art crime procedurals is dependable, but The Silk Road Affair surprises with its cultural heft. In passages written from the omniscient point of view of Quang Daiyu, leader of the Phoenix Group, we get a crash course in eastern pain and ambition. High on curiously strong tea, which is infused with opium, she imagines an interaction with former Chinese ruler Empress Cixi, basking in what she imagines is a shared lust for poetry, painting and power. Elsewhere, Witham’s characters collectively outline China’s “Century of Humiliation” as well as its “soft power” initiatives to get the world to bend to its will. It would make for riveting reading in any context, but in the context of Peale and Ho’s case, it’s pure gold.
