“This is very funny stuff, clever in its details and merciless in its satire... Irreverent . . . witty . . . the erudite but down-to-earth Fred is a treasure.”—New York Times Book Review

Arriving from Paris in Boston’s Logan airport, Fred Taylor, agent for eccentric art collector Clayton Reed, unwittingly grabs a smuggled treasure flung into the air by a dying passenger.

Not until much too late does Fred understand that the treasure — a medieval work of art whose subject is Lazarus — is in his hands. And now he must undertake to discover the identity of the work, as well as of its smuggler and its rightful owner. At the same time (for word gets out, and fast) he must fend off the increasingly aggressive attentions of both institutional and private collectors—not least among them his own employer Clayton Reed.

Fred’s search leads to an encounter with the life work, and the sudden death, of the self-proclaimed subversive landscape artist Jacob Geist. During five days of golden autumn, the race to identify, and to account for the treasure, takes us back six hundred years, through the blood and torment of this century to the treasure’s origin during the Hundred Years War. Throughout we are haunted by the seductive sweetness of the prevailing genius of Jacob Geist.

As usual, Kilmer delights in skewering the pretensions of the art world while constructing a brain teaser.

“Kilmer’s artful depiction of local color puts him in a category with the early work of Robert B. Parker, whose quick word pictures of people and places captured New England character.”—Boston Herald

“A deft and compelling use of historical crimes that mirror the felonies in decorous present-day Massachusetts vaults Fred’s fourth adventure (Dirty Linen) up into the league of Iain Pears’s art-history whodunits. —Kirkus Reviews

Fred Taylor’s four previous art mysteries (Henry Holt) are published in paperback ($14.95 each) by Poisoned Pen Press: Harmony in Flesh and Black (1-890208-47-7); Man with a Squirrel (1-890208-39-6); O Sacred Head (1-890208-48-5); Dirty Linen (1-890208-53-1).

Genre: Mystery