I am very picky about writing styles. Have you noticed? I don’t like (and won’t read) badly written books. I will, however, sometimes read a decently written book with a lousy plot. Ruth Brandon’s Caravaggio’s Angel fits into this category. I am a sucker for art mysteries and picked this up by chance.
It’s about a museum curator who is putting together an exhibition of Caravaggio paintings. Some paintings are missing; others are of dubious quality. Still others are suddenly unavailable for loan due to unexplained intransigence on the part of their purported owners. The curator, Reggie Lee, must sort all this out.
I didn’t like Reggie and I didn’t like her methods. I also didn’t like all the extraneous clutter that littered the story (a Surrealist plot from the 1930s; a loathsome French politician who does his best to thwart Reggie’s work, but yet to whom Reggie is inexplicably attracted; Reggie’s ill-advised fling with a French journalist who happens to be married to Reggie’s friend Delphine). Despite these complaints I was driven to finish the book.
How bad could it get? Pretty bad, in the end. Apparently this is the first book in a planned series about Reggie. I think I’ll pass on the rest of them.
Becky Holmes blogs about books at A Book A Week.
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