Re-inventing the Paris-based TV series Call My Agent! as Ten Percent and moving it to London didn’t seem like the worst idea in the world, but, alas, its je ne sais quoi got lost in translation and the bubbles went flat. Sometimes the flavor and soul of a place are fundamental to a work’s existence, and so it is with this month’s group of crime novels.
In Philip Miller’s The Goldenacre, an unshakable fog of Scottish melancholy weighs on Thomas Tallis, a former curator for a London gallery who has left his job and his family under a cloud and now works as a provenance inspector for the government. He’s in Edinburgh to determine the authenticity of a Charles Rennie Mackintosh masterpiece that belongs to a noble family who want to donate it to a museum for a considerable tax advantage. But what Tallis thought would be a quick formality turns into a trial, as the family and their transcendently beautiful painting prove to be elusive.
