"RESTRIKE" REVIEWED

What about a series of art world mystery novels?  “Restrike” features amateur detectives Coleman Greene, editor of an art magazine, and her cousin Dinah Greene, director of a print gallery. The consigner of a Winslow Homer is brutally murdered.
A reporter for Coleman’s magazine investigates; he too is murdered. Newly-found Durer prints are at auction. The Greenes discover they are mere restrikes. I have a restrike of a Rouault woodcut. An art dealer in Chicago purchased the original block, then printed and sold new copies -- always specifying that they were unauthorized restrikes. In this novel the restrikes are passed off as extremely-valuable originals. It could easily happen. Good crime novels make me turn their pages. This one did. Perhaps “Restrike” will inaugurate a successful new series.  If it has a defect, it is a lack of specificity -- why for instance do people forever meet in “Starbucks?” Perhaps the novelist does not really know New York. But it is a first novel. More and better work may be in the offing: more mysteries from the diabolical art world.  


[“Restrike” by Reba White Williams; fiction; Delos Press; 393 pages; ISBN 978-1-39052-00-1]