Caravaggio's Angel

August 25, 2008
Art, war, love and loss all figure in Brandon's enjoyable first in a series featuring art historian Reggie Lee. Recently hired by London's National Gallery, Reggie gets the approval of the museum's director to exhibit a 1605 Caravaggio altarpiece, St. Cecilia and the Angel
, along with the two copies the artist made, one of which is at the Getty, the other at the Louvre. When Antoine Rigaut, the Louvre's Italian collection administrator, refuses the loan, Reggie travels to Paris to confront Rigaut, who proves elusive and later turns up dead, an apparent suicide. Reggie eventually locates Riguat's elderly mother, a remarkable woman who holds the key to the complex history of the Louvre's copy of St. Cecilia and the Angel
, which was stolen and soon after recovered in 1937. When a third copy of the painting surfaces, Reggie really has her work cut out for her. Brandon is the author of Surreal Lives: The Surrealists, 1917–1945
and other works of nonfiction.

September 1, 2008
What should have been an easy job of setting up a small exhibition of three Caravaggio paintings of "St. Cecilia and the Angel" for London's National Gallery becomes a nightmare of intrigue and danger for curator Reggie Lee when a fourth copy of the painting emerges. Is this one a fake? And then people start to die. As Reggie investigates why someone wants to stop her show, she becomes entangled in French politics and art museum machinations. In her mystery debut, historian Brandon ("Surreal Lives: The Surrealists, 19171945") ties it all up at the end in a neat package but devotes so much of the book to a rehashing of facts that she may lose a few readers along the way. For larger collections where art mysteries are popular.

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