Chris Norgren Mysteries

Chris Norgren, museum curator and Renaissance art expert, heads to Berlin to assist in mounting a sensational exhibit: The Plundered Past-twenty priceless Old Masters looted by the Nazis, thought for decades to be lost forever, and only recently rediscovered. But things quickly get out of hand when Chris's patrician, fastidious boss, after smelling a forgery in the lot, turns up dead the very next day-on the steps of a dismal Frankfurt brothel, of all places. Now Chris faces two daunting tasks: finding a fake painting among the masterpieces and a real killer whose sights are now set on him.

Mild-mannered and law-abiding, Chris Norgren, curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Seattle Art Museum, is an unlikely undercover investigator, but when a priceless Rubens portrait is discovered in a shipment of "authentic reproductions" in a local warehouse, Chris is pressed into service to find out how it got there. The quest leads him to the medieval city of Bologna, one of his favorite places, but all too soon what might have been a welcome Italian interlude turns into a bizarre journey into shady art world doings and murderous secrets . . .

It is a headline-making story: the discovery of a previously unknown Rembrandt. René Vachey, the iconoclastic art dealer who claims to have uncovered it, wants to make a gift of it to the Seattle Art Museum, but curator Chris Norgren is wary. Vachey is notorious in art circles for perpetrating scandalous shams; not for profit but for the sheer fun of embarrassing the elite and snobbish "experts" of the art establishment. And thanks to the web of strings attached to Vachey's donation (e.g., no scientific testing permitted), even Rembrandt expert Chris is uncertain as to whether or not the painting is authentic. His doubts multiply when he goes to Dijon to examine it and finds himself in the middle of a host of controversies of which Vachey is the devilish focus. But there is no doubt that the bullet soon found in Vachey's head is authentic. And there is no telling how much time Chris has to find the truth about the "masterpiece"-and the murder-before he finds himself painted into a corner by a shrewd and villainous murderer. 1993 Nero Award, given by the Nero Wolfe Society/the Wolfe Pack for literary excellence in the mystery genre.