Name: Old Scores
ISBN: 9780449148990

Aaron J. Elkins

When a renowned French collector donates a previously unknown Rembrandt painting to the Seattle Art Museum, curator Chris Norgren travels to Europe on a fact-finding mission that soon takes a sinister and deadly turn. Reprint.

Old Scores

One of these days I am going to find a good theme book that can balance the theme and the mystery. It's going to happen, really, but not with Old Scores.

Don't get me wrong; this book is fantastic if you want to learn about art history or know about art history, and that's why I gave it three stars and not two. I like art crimes and studying them, as I think there are a lot of good moral questions brought up when it comes to the ownership of old paintings and museums. This book does a great job of delving into those questions and making the reader think about what exactly is happening in the art world of this fictional market.

The problem is that this is a murder mystery, or rather, the murder mystery is peppered in here and there with only mentioning it occasionally. The mystery is solved in a matter of minutes after a long and drawn out "investigation" by Chris Norgren, the protagonist. He just really investigates a supposed Rembrandt painting and then somehow figures out the murderer. This is also a style that I don't like, since we find out how he knew in the last chapters instead of getting clues throughout the book.

By the end of this book, I was just ready for it to be over. I think Elkins failed to weave the murder mystery in with the art mystery, and cutting one or the other to make it a non murder cozy mystery would have done wonders for the plot and my personal engagement. The random, angst ridden relationship also muddled things up for me, although I liked that Ann was as confused as I was in the end.

Old Scores

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