Skullduggery in the world of fine art is the focus of this fast-paced, creakily written novel. The only male character approaching the heroic is Jack Fitzgerald Delaney, an FBI agent of good taste and greater doggedness.
The heroine, Anna Petrescu, is attractive, purposeful and moral. Bryce Fenston, the villain, is a banker with an addiction to Van Gogh and a past as a high-level thug in the administration of former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The most credible, most thoroughly imagined character is Olga Krantz, the tiny killer Fenston uses to cut down the competition. These create enough of a thriller to make Jeffrey Archer’s “False Impressions” an entertaining, if clichéd, reading experience.
The story begins with the fatal knifing of Lady Victoria Wentworth as she is about to consummate the sale of “Self-portrait With Bandaged Ear,” among the rarest Van Goghs. The Wentworth family needs to pay off a usurious bank loan from Fenston, who specializes in lending money to lapsed nobility with fabulous art collections. The person who murders Lady Victoria cuts off her left ear – just as the famous Dutch painter did to himself after a row with Gauguin.
The action spans Sept. 10-26, 2001, giving Archer an opportunity to weave the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 into a plot seesawing halfway between overstuffed and thrilling. Archer also takes the opportunity to use his knowledge of art to construct a story about the old switcheroo, of which there are several doozies.
The writing can be awful: “She sat in the car for some time, trying to compose herself. Why didn’t she just drive off? She didn’t need to become involved or even consider taking such a risk. She then thought about Victoria and the role she had unwittingly played in her death. ‘Get on with it, woman,’ Anna said out loud. ‘They either know or they don’t, and if they’ve already been tipped off, you’ll be back in the car in less than two minutes.’ Anna looked in the mirror. Were there any giveaway signs?”
I doubt people have talked to themselves this way since the Restoration.
But the writing can be decent too. Here’s how Krantz honed her craft: “She filled her weekend cutting the throats of lambs and calves. Her Olympic record was forty-two in an hour. None of the slaughtermen reached the final.”
The action cuts from New York to London to Tokyo to Bucharest to Hong Kong. My favorite scenes are in Romania, which Anna visits to marshal forces to defeat Fenston, a cad, a bounder … insults fail me. But even the Romania action – intriguing partially because so little surfaces about that shadowy country – suffers from a lack of character invention: Anna’s ailing mother, her former lover Anton and the noble taxi driver, Sergei, are shopworn plot vehicles.
Oh, well. “False Impressions” is also fun. It straddles potboiler and thriller, strewing enough names and time-checked references along the path to qualify as a pleasurable vacation read.
Carlo Wolff is a freelance writer in Cleveland.
False Impressions
By Jeffrey Archer
St. Martin’s Press, 384 pages, $27.95
