Painted Ladies: Alas, not Robert B. Parker's best (#31)

I've always enjoyed dipping into Robert B. Parker's crime novels - it's not usually my genre but I enjoy his humor, and over the years I've let the books find me. (Although I haven't read one since 2006; apparently the path can be long and twisty.) I noticed this one of the library's website and checked it out on a whim, intrigued by the premise - yet again - of an art mystery. It was kind of amazing how much this one mirrored Daniel Silva's The Rembrandt Affair, which I had read only two months before.

But I wasn't a big fan of Painted Ladies unfortunately - which seems disrespectful, considering that he died in January 2010 before this novel was published. (His last book, however, appears to be Sixkill.) Publishers Weekly called it "lackluster," which is an apt description. Painted Ladies was missing both Parker's usual zing and a complex and/or thrilling plot.

The plot centers around the death of art historian and professor Ashton Prince who Spenser agrees to protect during the recovery of a fictitious Dutch painting called "Lady with a Finch." But things go awry and Prince dies and the painting gets incinerated - which Spenser won't tolerate under his watch. So Spenser decides to figure it out, making it his own personal mission. And like the painting in The Rembrandt Affair, "Lady with a Finch" turns out to have a sordid history, having also been confiscated from a wealthy Dutch family during the Holocaust. (Even the families have similar names: Herzberg here and Herzfeld there.) In the present day, Spenser tries to charm - both successfully and unsuccessfully - a mother, daughter, and a mysterious art foundation.

But it never felt suspenseful; the links were just too easy. There was also one major inconsistency, which I was really surprised that the editor or copyeditor didn't catch: On p. 177, Winifred goes from being a certain someone's ex-girlfriend to being his ex-wife for the rest of the book. And while that seems minor, about 20 pages before, another character made a huge deal of the fact that they were never married, saying, "Fact is, for crissake, she was shacking up with some guy who had no intention of marrying her, and when she got knocked up, he left" (p. 152). It really stuck out to me.

So all in all, not my favorite of the four Robert B. Parker books that I've read. But as I was perusing the Amazon reviews (most people seemed to like Painted Ladies for sentimental reasons), I saw many mentions of his highly praised first novel The Godwulf Manuscript which I will add to my booklist for next year.