Feint of Art: An Annie Kincaid Mystery [Paperback]

This is a cozy mystery set in San Francisco. Its subject is art forgery. Its protagonist is a young woman who is one-third Stephanie Plum, one-third art forger (by heritage) and one-third Audrey Hepburn as she appeared in a marvelously stylish but now largely forgotten caper film of the 1960s called "How to Steal a Million."

This is a perfectly entertaining, lightweight mystery of the Stephanie Plum-light category of cozies. If your taste runs to such things, especially during the yawning gaps between publication of the authentic Plums, this book is well-worth the purchase. It is derivative as all get out, not that that is necessarily such a bad thing.

The heroine, Annie Kinkaid, is very much of the Plum-sisterhood: a basically inept investigator who is simultaneously strongly drawn to a very bad boy and to a not quite so bad boy--and they are equally irresistibly drawn to her. Too bad no car of Annie's gets blown up, but you can't have everything! On the other hand, Annie, like Audrey, is heir to a family tradition of art forgery. She has deep emotional ties to an elderly male relative, a master forger who resides in Paris and who is amusingly evasive about his forgeries, truth and everything else. In the movie, Audrey's very bad boy was Peter O'Toole. Annie's bad boys aren't up to that level but, as I said, you can't have everything.

That noted, I think the book could have been better. It was written, so says the colophon, by "two sisters, one a historian in Virginia, the other an artist in California." There is just enough in the book about the gentle art of forgery to make me think that at least one sister knows what she is talking about, but not enough is on the printed pages to serve as more than a lazy hook for a cozy plot. And all that stuff about being able to spot any forgery at a glance, with the implication that all forgers leave a characteristic calling card in their work as a sop to their egos is simple nonsense. Consider the fact that the authenticated works of works of so well-known an artist as Rembrandt were very numerous in the 1920s, were ruthlessly pruned of supposed forgeries in the 1950s and now are growing again with the welcome return of some of those very "forgeries."

Then there is the setting. One sister may well live in California, but not, I think in San Francisco. Much of the action takes place in, around, or about a major art museum called the "Brock." All things considered, the "Brock" is a caricature of the DeYoung Museum, but it is a blandly generic caricature of a museum that is splendidly idiosyncratic in character, architecture and location.

And the geography of San Francisco ...! Consider this passage: "Invigorated, I circled the hilly, clogged streets of San Francisco's Noe Valley and Bernal Heights neighborhoods, sure that I would recognize Anton's studio when I saw it.... After half an hour of fruitless searching, I lost all confidence in my powers of recollection.... I angled the truck into a tiny parking space on Sixteenth in front of Mission Dolores and pulled out my phone." [Page 41 of the mass paperback edition.]

Now, it so happens that I lived for more than twenty years between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets in San Francisco. Every school day for three years I walked up Sixteenth past Mission Dolores to get to my junior high school, one block further on. When I walked out of my front door on the way to school, looking left, due south, I could see Bernal Heights about two miles away, looming over the rooftops. Noe Valley was out of sight, but about the same distance away, and just south of due west. Traffic in San Francisco being what it is, I can guarantee that no-one could drive a search pattern of the "hilly streets" of those two widely separated neighborhoods in just half an hour--even if I ignore the fact that the Noe Valley is just that, a flat valley between highlands. Presumably those hilly Noe streets were on what I or any other San Franciscan would call Twin Peaks.

Geography and forgery to the contrary, the book is still amusing and worth the read.

(But rent the movie. It's much more entertaining. And Audrey never looked better.)

Annie Kincaid grew up at the feet of her grandfather, famous art forger Georges LeFleur. She learned the art of forgery herself, but after a run in with the law, she tried to put that behind her. Now, she runs a faux finishing studio in San Francisco.

But her past comes back to her when ex-boyfriend Ernst Pettigrew asks her to authenticate a Caravaggio painting. Not only does Annie recognize it as a forgery, but she recognizes the painting as the work of Anton, a friend of her grandfather.

Within an hour of her identification, a guard at the museum is murdered and Ernst disappears.

Meanwhile, a local art dealer has disappeared with drawings from the Old Masters, leaving behind forgeries by Anton. Can Annie find Anton and all the originals?

This is a fast and fun debut. I'd call it a cozy caper. The plot was so much fun. And while it could have been wrapped up just a tad neater (a couple things are left to our imagination, although it is pretty easy to figure out), the ending makes sense. Plus the book is populated with memorable characters. Annie is a hoot. She had me laughing the entire way through, even at the tense scenes. And there are some other great characters I can't wait to meet again.

You can bet this won't be the last in this series I read. I'm looking forward to another trip through the dark side of the art community with Annie as my guide.