The Eye of the Beholder

218 pages. Octavo (8 1/2" x 5 1/4") bound in original publisher's quarter black cloth with silver lettering to spine over grey boards in original pictorial jacket. First American edition. Jane is divorced--not only from her rich, drug-dealing husband but from her upper-class family as well. She's a minor-level TV journalist at the BBC, now on assignment in Lorraine. France, with producer Dan Cohen, exploring the possibilities of a film piece about collaboration with the Germans in WW II. Their most important contact in the area is historian and local bigwig Claude Mesnil, who helps them gain entree into the local archives. Jane's first vist there, however, ends in disaster when she stumbles on the battered corpse of the elderly guard. So begins Jane's conviction that something--and more than just the killing--is rotten in France. It's this obsession of hers that eventually involves 17th-century Lorraine painter Georges De Latour; art and document forgeries; painstaking research in France, London, and New York; a fatal ""accident""; and another brutal murder--the end result being a vindication for Jane, with echoes of real-life scandals abounding. There are glimpses of the byzantine workings of a media colossus; many diverting characters: a quirky, sometimes enigmatic heroine; and a flow-to-build but intriguing puzzle. A sophisticated first novel--written with verve and polish. Condition: Front head corner bumped, remainder mark at heal end pages else a near fine copy in a fine jacket.