Bearer of Secrets: An Art Heist Mystery (Celine Skye Psychic Mystery Series)
Psychic Mystery
3rd in Series
Setting – Paso Robles, CA and Boston, MA
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Foiled Plots Press (June 27, 2024)
Print length ‏ : ‎ 397 pages

Synopsis

SIZZLING SUSPENSE: Based on the True Story of Boston’s Gardner Museum Theft!

Could a stolen Degas unravel a cold-case art heist? Celine must find out before murder closes in . . .

Shattered by a journalist’s death and sensing danger to his mother, Clara, psychic art sleuth Celine Skye struggles to focus on the Gardner Museum theft. Until a stolen Degas taken eight years after the heist surfaces—along with new clues and visions of Clara in peril.

Compelled to investigate, Celine has a startling revelation linking Clara to a Gardner Museum insider. Could Clara’s son have uncovered evidence implicating her friend in the theft?

With the threat to Clara escalating, Celine must find the truth before murder finds them both. . .

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Guest Post

The Key to Cracking an Unsolved Heist

Nupur Tustin

What do you need to crack an art heist? In particular, one that’s so old, all the trails have gone cold?

For one thing, it helps to be psychic—like Celine Skye, the protagonist of the Celine Skye Psychic Mysteries. The series is based on the unsolved Gardner Museum theft.

It won’t surprise you to learn that, as a psychic, Celine’s insights can help breathe new life into a cold case. Law enforcement will frequently turn to psychics like Noreen Renier and Allison DuBois when they’ve run out of leads.

Indeed, they’re encouraged to in textbooks on homicide investigation.

But this is a decades-old art heist we’re talking about. Being psychic helps, but it’s not enough. There’s something else that makes Celine the perfect person to take on the Gardner heist.

An aspiring artist, Celine, studied art in college. That included courses on art history and art techniques through the course of history. Celine never did fulfill her dream of becoming an artist. The visions of murder that invaded her mind and a particularly horrible experience at the Montague Museum in New England turned her off art for life.

(You can read all about it in the Celine Skye series prequel, Visions of Murder.)

But what she’s learned as an art student is immensely helpful to her as a psychic art sleuth.

You can’t hope to recover stolen art unless you know something about the artist, the period in which he worked, and how extensively or not the artist was forged in his own day and later.

You’d have to be very familiar with the stolen work and the artist’s techniques to know whether a work you’d seen was the one you were hunting down. Sometimes, thieves will add or remove elements to a stolen work to make it less recognizable, although it can be still be sold as a work “in the style of” or most likely by or “from the school of” the artist in question.

It takes an astute eye to discover that the work has been changed. In one case, for instance, the thieves had painted in shutters to a piece portraying a country home. The detective who recovered the work noticed that the shutters added in were unusual in that they failed to cast a corresponding shadow on the green lawn extending in front of the house!

Sometimes, thieves will circulate the original stolen work in the underworld using it as collateral for loans, but offer several forged copies of the work for sale to dealers and collectors who may not know much better.

Even experienced art sleuths can be duped.

That’s what happened to coin dealer William Veres. He’d teamed up with Dutch art detective Arthur Brand to recover a stolen Caravaggio. It had been taken in 1969 from a church in Palermo, Italy. But Veres and Brand had decided that if, in the course of their investigation, they were offered other stolen works by their Mafia contacts, they wouldn’t refuse them.

Sure enough, there was an opportunity to recover a work of lesser value: Adoration of the Magi by the seventeenth-century artist, Sigismondo. It had been stolen from a Florentine church in 2011.

The Mafia “middlemen” offering to negotiate the terms by which the work would be recovered asked for a substantial sum to cover their costs—for travel, gas, and so on.

Brand agreed. But when the painting was examined, it was found to be a fake. Not a particularly good one either.

The art detective and the coin dealer had been duped.

What about you? Do you find art and art heists intriguing? Share your thoughts with us. And don’t forget to enter the Giveaway for a print copy of Bearer of Secrets, the latest Celine Skye Psychic Mystery. If you enjoy art heists, intrigue, and murder, this is a book you won’t want to miss!

About the Author

A former journalist, Nupur Tustin is the author of the Joseph Haydn Mysteries set in Austria, the Celine Skye Psychic Mysteries, based on the infamous Gardner Museum theft, and the author of Sophie’s Adventures, about a French James Bond who goes on undercover missions to recover stolen art and artifacts.

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