Iain Pears

Clever Italian art-history crime series featuring scholar and dealer Jonathon Argyll, from the author of the best-selling masterpiece 'An Instance of the Fingerpost'.

First in the Italian art-history crime series featuring English dealer and sleuth Jonathan Argyll, from the author of the best-selling masterpiece 'An Instance of the Fingerpost'.

Larissa Salmina and Francis Haskell met by chance in a Venetian restaurant in September 1962. Prior to this fateful meal, Larissa escaped the siege of Leningrad and lived in the Urals, surrounded by Spanish revolutionaries. She became Keeper of Italian Drawings at the Hermitage and attended the 1962 Venice Biennale, where she stole ("I didn't steal it. I liberated it") a Matisse painting. Francis was a historian who never felt safe in England, his own country, and had abandoned hope of falling in love or finding anyone who could love him. But broader forces of destiny and luck brought them together and changed both of their lives. Parallel Lives brings into sharp focus the strange world of the Soviet Union, and the even stranger world of a certain variety of the English elite. It is a world of dancers, exiles, and the occasional spy, of artists, aristocrats, and academics. It is a tale of a world we have lost.

This is the simplest tale in the world. Two people meet and fall in love. But the route which brought Larissa Salmina and Francis Haskell to a backstreet Venetian restaurant in 1962 was anything but straightforward.

From the author of the international best seller An Instance of the Fingerpost, Arcadia is an astonishing work of imagination. In Cold War England, Professor Henry Lytten, having renounced a career in espionage, is writing a fantasy novel that dares to imagine a world less fraught than his own. He finds an unlikely confidante in Rosie, an inquisitive young neighbor who, while chasing after Lytten's cat one day, stumbles through a doorway in his cellar and into a stunning and unfamiliar bucolic landscape--remarkably like the fantasy world Lytten is writing about. There she meets a young boy named Jay who is about to embark on a journey that will change both their lives. Elsewhere, in a distopian society where progress is controlled by a corrupt ruling elite, the brilliant scientist Angela Meerson has discovered the potential of a powerful new machine. When the authorities come knocking, she will make an important decision--one that will reverberate through all these different lives and worlds.

But is this world real -- and what happens if Rosie decides to stay?Meanwhile, a rebellious scientist is trying to prove that time does not even exist -- with potentially devastating consequences. As the three worlds come together, one question arises: who controls the future -- or the past...?

Henry Lytten - a spy turned academic and writer - sits at his desk in Oxford in 1962, dreaming of other worlds. He embarks on the story of Jay, an eleven-year-old boy who has grown up within the embrace of his family in a rural, peaceful world - a kind of Arcadia. But when a supernatural vision causes Jay to question the rules of his world, he is launched on a life-changing journey. Lytten also imagines a different society, highly regulated and dominated by technology, which is trying to master the science of time travel. Meanwhile - in the real world - one of Lytten's former intelligence colleagues tracks him down for one last assignment. As he and his characters struggle with questions of free will, love, duty and the power of the imagination, Lytten discovers he is not sure how he wants his stories to end, nor even who is imaginary...

John Stone, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War One he was able to manipulate markets, industries and indeed whole countries and continents, has been found dead in mysterious circumstances.

At his London home, John Stone falls out of a window to his death. A financier and arms dealer, Stone was a man so wealthy that he was able to manipulate markets, industries, and indeed entire countries and continents. Did he jump, was he pushed, or was it merely a tragic accident? His alluring and enigmatic widow hires a young crime reporter to investigate. The story moves backward in time--from London in 1909 to Paris in 1890 and finally to Venice in 1867--and the attempts to uncover the truth play out against the backdrop of the evolution of high-stakes international finance, Europe's first great age of espionage, and the start of the twentieth century's arms race. Stone's Fall is a tale of love and frailty, as much as it is of high finance and skulduggery. The mixture, then, as now, is an often fatal combination.

Witty and clever art history-mystery featuring Jonathan Argyll, from the author of the bestselling masterpiece â??An Instance of the Fingerpostâ??.

Clever and witty art history-mystery featuring scholar and sleuth Jonathon Argyll, from the author of the bestselling masterpiece ‘An Instance of the Fingerpost’. A tip-off without any names and a theft with no obvious motive – these are the apparently innocuous matters currently in the hands of Flavia di Stefano of Rome's Art Theft Squad. Flavia is able to disturb the looters of the monastery in San Giovanni but not catch them. And it's a good thing that nothing valuable was stolen because neither she nor art dealer Jonathan Argyll have a clue who the culprits were. Maybe the truth lies with the item they did get away with – not the disputed Caravaggio the monastery is known for, but a curious icon of the Madonna that is said to have strange powers. Such claims are pure folklore, surely… but then a connection is made to a French dealer found floating in the Tiber a few days later and suddenly things don't seem so frivolous. Perhaps the icon was what the thieves wanted – and is it possible that its powers are miraculous enough to kill for?

Clever and witty art history-mystery featuring Jonathon Argyll, scholar and sleuth, from the bestselling author of 'An Instance of the Fingerpost'.

Witty Italian art-history crime series featuring English dealer Jonathan Argyll, from the author of the best-selling literary masterpiece, ‘An Instance of the Fingerpost’. Paris can do strange things to a man's mind… like making him agree to an apparently harmless favour of escorting a picture to Rome. ‘The Death of Socrates’ is a particularly nondescript piece, so art dealer Jonathan Argyll can sympathize when its recipient refuses to accept delivery. But in an unusual twist, the same man is found dead a few hours later. Surely the painting wasn't that bad? Now caught up in a murder investigation, Jonathan recalls an attempt to steal the artwork while he was at the train station. Could this be the killer? The bodies start piling up and Jonathan must uncover the dark wartime secret at the heart of the mystery – before someone puts him out of the picture for good.

Witty Italian art-history crime series featuring English dealer Jonathan Argyll, from the author of the best-selling literary masterpiece, 'An Instance of the Fingerpost'. Membership of the prestigious Titian Committee is normally considered a high honour. Normally, that is, until two of its members end up dead and someone seems to be taking the idea of backstabbing a little too far. Flavia de Stefano of Rome's Art Theft Squad is sent to find out why. She calls upon the help of dealer Jonathan Argyll, in Venice to buy a picture from the Marchesa di Mulino. But the sudden theft of the Marchesa's collection sets Flavia and Jonathan on a tortuous trail to uncover the truth. A further death threatens the very survival of the Committee itself, as well as offering the tantalizing possibility of an undiscovered Titian – a mysterious composition that may have been suppressed for 'moral' reasons….

A dark and disturbing novel of suspense, set at the turn of the 20th century, by the bestselling author of ââ?¬Ë?An Instance of the Fingerpostââ?¬â?¢.

Journeying to a remote French island to sit for a portrait that is painted by his tormented artist friend, an influential London art critic recalls the early years of their friendship, his own influence over aspiring artists, and the power struggle between subject and artist in the course of the sitting. By the author of An Instance of the Fingerpost. Reprint. 100,000 first printing.

From internationally bestselling author Iain Pears comes the seventh in his Jonathan Argyll series -- an intriguing mystery of love, loss, and artistic license. For newlywed and Italian art theft squad head Flavia di Stefano, the honeymoon is over when a painting, borrowed from the Louvre and en route to a celebratory exhibition, is stolen. Desperate to avoid public embarrassment -- and to avoid paying a ransom -- the Italian prime minister leans hard on Flavia to get it back quickly and quietly. Across town, her husband, art historian Jonathan Argyll, begins an investigation of his own, tracing the past of a small Renaissance painting -- an Immaculate Conception -- owned by Flavia's mentor, retired general Taddeo Bottando. Soon both husband and wife uncover astonishing and chilling secrets, and Flavia's investigation takes a sudden turn from the search for an art thief to the hunt for a murderer.

After British art historian Jonathan Argyll sells a minor masterpiece to an American museum for an exorbitant price, the museum's owner is murdered, a disreputable art dealer disappears with a Bernini bust, and Argyll discovers his life is in danger. Reprint.

The monastery of San Giovanni on Rome's Aventine Hill has no real treasures, except for one huge and disturbing painting, dubiously attributed to Caravaggio, of the breaking of Saint Catherine on the wheel. It's not a subject likely to appeal to many buyers of stolen art. But a Caravaggio is a Caravaggio - or is it? Following a recent burglary at the monastery's chapel, there's little left to steal, so Flavia di Stefano of Rome's Art Theft Squad is particularly puzzled when she receives a tip that thieves plan to raid the building. What is there, except perhaps the Caravaggio, that professionals could covet? Even stranger is the sudden arrival in Italy of Mary Verney, an Englishwoman and thief whom Flavia and her art-expert fiance, Jonathan Argyll, have encountered before. She may be there as a tourist, but it's unlikely. Is Mary after personal riches, or is her trip, and her possible involvement in a theft, inspired by more terrifying circumstances? Something strange and threatening is occurring both inside and outside the monastery, and Jonathan and Flavia feel powerless when they fail either to stop a theft or a murder. As the two search for answers through the maze of monastic and police bureaucracy, they gradually reveal a surprise more shocking than even they had imagined.