- ASIN: B0DYS2J6G8
- Publisher: Archway Publishing
- Publication date: 20 Feb. 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 250 pages
- ISBN-13: 978-1665772617
- Genre: Mystery-Crime Art and Cultural Thriller Fiction
The BookViral Review:
Larry Witham’s The Haunted Artist—the fourth entry in his Julian Peale Art-Crime Mystery series—opens with a small New England town stunned by the death of rising painter Sam Mason, a case the police close as suicide and that Mason’s sister refuses to accept. Enter Julian Peale of Castelli & Associates, a quietly dogged investigator whose remit sits at the crossroads of art history, crime, and commerce.
Witham’s plot is a braided chase: Peale follows whispers of Mason’s missing oeuvre through art schools and galleries, storage units and studios, from Boston and Lynn down the Eastern Seaboard and across middle America—Pittsburgh, Savannah, St. Louis, Atlanta—mapping the shadow economy that feeds on talent before fame hardens into value. The early funeral scene smartly establishes the book’s central tension: dealers and tastemakers circling a “late, great” in the making, hungry for paintings no one can quite locate.
The investigation soon brushes up against a clever (and ethically slippery) market mechanism—Curator Services and its financial backer, the Bravura Foundation—a scaffolding of “scouting,” seeded shows, and manufactured momentum that can mint a career’s perception before the work earns it. Witham renders this machinery in brisk, plausible detail, including the code-word games and shell-like structures that keep money and influence insulated from scrutiny.
More menacing is the Albanian connection: small-time operators who discover that contemporary art, with its opaque pricing and preference for anonymity, is a fine vehicle for laundering illicit cash. Their intersection with Mason—first as “help,” then as leverage—adds crime-novel torque without tipping into pulp. Witham is especially sharp on how financial pressure, youthful naiveté, and the promise of exposure can coax artists toward bad bargains.
Characterization is economical but effective. Peale is no swaggering sleuth; he’s observant, methodical, and humane, a former Navy intelligence officer who knows when to look, when to listen, and when to wait. Around him, Witham sketches a lively rogues’ gallery: the smooth Boston–Manhattan gallerist Monica Smithton; the dapper field man Max Dunnaway; and Victor Kamin, an operator whose respectable facade conceals messy entanglements. Their motives—profit, reputation, survival—rarely align, which keeps the dialogue tetchy and the alliances provisional.
Threaded through the commerce is a brief but intriguing element: hints of Mason’s late interest in the occult. A few scattered references—to unusual books, esoteric ideas, and talk of “channeling” inspiration—add a faintly eerie undertone without steering the novel into supernatural territory. Witham uses it sparingly, more as a texture that deepens Mason’s mystique than as a driving force in the plot, and it serves primarily to keep both characters and readers questioning how much of the artist’s legacy is grounded in fact, myth, or deliberate self-invention.
The pacing is steady, procedural, and satisfying. Chapters move with reportorial clarity—interviews, site visits, paper trails—punctuated by sharp turns when commerce curdles into crime. If anything, a few explanatory passages about the art market’s plumbing run a touch long, but they pay dividends in the finale, where motives, money, and myth converge. The closing pages deliver closure without comfort: some answers are found, others are cauterized, and the cost to the living (and to the work itself) lingers.
In sum, The Haunted Artist is a smart, absorbing art-world mystery: part industry exposé, part moral fable, part ghost story of the creative self. It will particularly reward readers who like their crime fiction steeped in real systems—auctions, galleries, foundations—where value is negotiated in back rooms long before it’s displayed on the wall.
It is highly recommended!
