Hailey Lind, Shooting Gallery

Shooting Gallery

Hailey Lind

Signet, Oct 2006, $6.99, 352 pp.

ISBN 0451219732

Annie Kincaid grew up knowing the people who populated the art underworld thanks to her grandfather, the expert forger Georges LeFleur. Annie is almost as good an artist and at seventeen was arrested for selling forgeries of French masters. The only reason she isn't doing prison time is there was no evidence and the French couldn't believe an American could do such work that even the experts were fooled.

At an open air art exhibit, Annie is the only one who knows that the sculpture of a man is really a dead body with his fingers chopped off. At the same time of her discovery, a Chagall painting is stolen and her friend Bryan is the number one suspect. She promises to find the painting and while there she is hired by the Hewitts to get back the sculpture Head and Torso taken by his creator Robert Pascal. She also agrees to help her landlord, the owner of a security firm, to restore a Picasso that has crayons drawn on it. When Michael, the notorious art thief comes back in her life, she suddenly receives death threats and is almost killed by someone who believes she has something they want.

The protagonist in Shooting Gallery is a vibrant and quirky character who tries so hard to stay on the right side of the law but when the people she cares about are in trouble she finds herself in shaky legal territory. The support cast is populated with eccentric characters who add a lot of humor to this fast paced delightful amateur sleuth tale. Readers will want more mysteries starring the incomparable Anne Kincaid

Harriet Klausner