A few plot glitches made this book really hard for me to get into. The hero, Maguire, is a former war reporter who got burned out and started working for a tabloid. His latest assignment is to write an expose, which he hopes to turn into a book, about Aristide Pompasse, the famous artist.

Since when do tabloids pay attention to artists? Since when do hack reporters, let alone hack reporters with a background in war journalism, write artist monographs? In my experience, there isn't a lot of mingling between art critics and biographers and popular journalism; nor does Maguire have the kind of background that would allow him to write even a halfway competent biography of a contemporary artist.

Not only that, he sneaks into the artist's villa posing as an insurance adjuster and nobody stops to ask him - which insurance company? If you have millions of dollars worth of art in your home, and you pay through the nose for insurance (appraisal costs about 15% of the artwork, so we are talking huge sums of money) you will know the name of your insurance company, and your insurance company will be very, very communicative about who they are sending to your home, and why, and when. Random people walking into your house and saying that the government (?) sent them to dig through your cabinets looking for missing diaries are not going to get very far.

Plus, the kind of art that Pompasse makes - realistic portraits of his mistresses, mostly - just wouldn't make an artist famous these days. It's like Stuart thinks she can write a contemporary-set novel in which all of modern art never happened. Frustrating.

I was annoyed by some of the secondary characters - Charlie's mom Olivia, for example, would have been wonderful but she is too sketchy, and almost all her lines sound more like something a psychiatrist would say about her than something she would say herself. And Charlie's fiance, Henry, is cartoonishly repulsive - I presume so that the reader doesn't feel bad as Charlie falls in love with somebody else.

I wished that the romance had been better developed. Once it got going, I found a lot about their relationship really compelling. Maguire's character is wonderful; his experiences as a war reporter have really shaped his character - he is not self-indulgent or careless with people, but he is wounded. Charlie was also damaged in the name of a higher ideal - because she believed in Pompasse's genius, she put up with a lot of cruelty from him. It is not easy for either to lower their defenses, to trust, to hope.

But I didn't feel like they really engaged with one another until halfway through the book or so. Before that it's all just minor skirmishing.

I figured out who the murderer was very early on, and that was disappointing. It takes a while for the suspense to kick in. ( )

http://jacescribbles.blogspot.com/2008/09/widow-by-anne-stuart.html ( )