The Bottom Line: The Haunted Artist is a taut, refreshing and fascinating work of detective fiction you can easily finish on a coast-to-coast flight.
The fourth installment of the Julian Peale Art-Crime Mystery series begins with a small town funeral for 28-year-old Sam Mason. Regarded as a rising young star in the art world, Sam had apparently sold enough paintings to pay off his mothers’ mortgage. His apparent death by suicide came shortly before he was to have his first big New York art show.
But Sam’s younger sister, for one, doesn’t believe the cause of death. As we soon learn, Sam was in touch with some less-than-honest business contacts, including a pair of Albanian art scammers, Victor and Marku (which attracts the attention of the FBI). At art school, he had also purportedly been into an “occult library.” Exactly how did it all tie together?
Enter investigator Julian Peale. His work to trace Sam’s activities and find missing paintings will take him on the road, and include a variety of academic, artistic and community situations. Among the most visceral drawn by author Larry Witham is the 168-acre MIT campus, of which Peale’s observations leap off the page (“The Brutalist style had taken over a lot of college campuses. The idea was that the building’s materials of cement and glass were supposed to be ‘honest’ about themselves”).
With Peale, author Larry Witham has carved out a delightful niche within an otherwise largely monotonous detective genre. Through Peale’s investigation into Sam’s life, we vicariously enter a fascinating world where an artist’s death can be shockingly lucrative. Even typically mundane details surrounding things like museum insurance somehow become fascinating in Peale’s universe, and the occasional snarky observations by characters elevate the prose (“A bit haughty, but maybe that went with the museum and gallery territory”).
Aside from the fact that The Haunted Artist doesn’t obsess over the typical grisly murder details, it is a relatively straightforward investigative procedural. However the fact that it’s set within the lens of the art world renders it especially delicious and refreshing. At a brisk 218 pages in total, Witham’s latest art-crime mystery is an easy read. Come for the murder mystery, but stay for the missing art investigation.
