Deadly Provenance

De: Lynne Kennedy

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

San Diego Union-Tribune (U-T)
Lynne Kennedy’s novel, Deadly Provenance, focuses on “Still Life: Vase with Oleanders,” a Vincent van Gogh painting that disappeared from a French chateau during World War II. In fiction, she solves this mystery. In truth, she’s still on the case.

San Diego Jewish Journal
Kennedy may not get to the bottom of this perplexing (real-life) mystery like her character in Deadly Provenance did, but she sure is having fun trying.

“Still Life: Vase with Oleanders” is a painting by Vincent van Gogh, believed to have been confiscated by the Nazis during World War II. Today, seventy years later, world-renowned digital photographer, Maggie Thornhill, is searching for the missing work of art. Her lifelong friend, Ingrid, has asked her to do the impossible--authenticate the painting from a 1940s photograph.

The photograph in question was passed down to Ingrid by her grandfather, Klaus Rettke, a key member of the German Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the Nazi organization appointed to confiscate art from the Jews. Obscure references in Klaus Rettke’s diary convince Maggie that Rettke stole the painting from the Nazis.

Now she must use science to verify that the painting in the photo is genuine, something that has never been done before. From the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. to the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris, Maggie searches for answers. Finally, she confronts the possibility that there is not one painting, but the original and several forgeries. With tens of millions of dollars at stake and a killer at large, she is determined to find the authentic Van Gogh. To do so, Maggie must stay alive . . . something that’s proving difficult to do.