Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Lisa Barr, Welbeck Publishing, $32.99.
It’s the words on the opening pages that spark the flame of curiosity as an astute young journalist gets embroiled in a major international art scandal centred around a Nazi-looted masterpiece.
Award-winner Lisa Barr has produced an engrossing thriller. So much so that Golden Globe and Emmy winner Sharon Stone (Basic Instinct, The Specialist, The Flight Attendant, Ratched) has optioned the rights to Barr’s novel Woman on Fire, inking a deal to produce and star in a film adaptation.
The prologue features an edgy kidnapping that ends with these two heated questions: “Why didn’t she run or scream when she had the chance? Is this damn painting worth her life and those of the people she loves?”
After talking her way into a job, Jules Roth is given an unusual assignment: locate a painting stolen by the Nazis more than 75 years earlier. The painting? None other than legendary artist Ernst Engel’s most famous work, Woman on Fire.
World-renowned shoe designer Ellis Baum wants this portrait of a mysterious woman for deeply personal reasons, but Jules doesn’t have much time; the famous designer is dying.
In Europe, meanwhile, provocative and powerful Margaux de Laurent also searches for the painting. Heir to her art collector family’s millions, Margaux is a cunning gallerist who gets everything she wants. The only thing standing in her way is Jules. Yet Jules has resources of her own, including Adam Baum, Ellis’s grandson. A recovering addict and artist in his own right, Adam was once in Margaux’s clutches, and he’ll do anything to help Jules locate the painting before Margaux.
However, Jules must contemplate whether finding the painting and exposing its dark past is worth her life.
The exquisite work of art burns bright as it moves through hands and hearts and we get to look behind the curtain to see a worldwide art world of ‘players and cons.’
The ultimate showdown is forced between passion and possession, lovers and liars, history and truth. The question then is where the line should be drawn between the pursuit of justice and the hunt for revenge.
