Ethan Muller is struggling to establish his reputation as a dealer in the cutthroat world of contemporary art when he stumbles onto a decaying New York slum, an elderly tenant named Victor Cracke has disappeared, leaving behind an enormous trove of original artwork. Nobody can say anything for certain about Cracke except that he came and went in solitude for nearly forty years, his genius hidden and unacknowledged.
All that is about to change.
So what if, strictly speaking, the art doesn't belong to Ethan ? He can sell it-
and he does just that, mounting a wildly successful show.
Buyers clamor. Critics sing. Museums are interested, and Ethan's photo looks great in the New York Times.
And that's when things go to hell.
Suddenly the police are interested in talking to him. It seems that Victor Cracke had a nasty past, and the drawings hanging in the Muller Gallery have begun to look a lot less like art and a lot more like evidence.
Is Cracke a genius ? A murderer ? Both ?
Is there a difference ?
Sucked into an investigation four decades cold, Ethan will uncover a secret legacy of shame and death, one that touches horrifyingly close to home.
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Art gallerist Ethan Muller sees a lot of success when his father right hand Tony Wexler shows him an apartment filled with drawings of the vanished Victor Wexler and how he saw and imagined the world.
He sets Cracke's drawings up for success and soon becomes topic number one in all the big papers when an ex-cop approaches him.
He saw one of the pictures printed in the newspaper and the little Cherub in it looks just like a little boy who was killed in the 50's.
Ethan soon discovers that a few other pictures with Cherubs resemble other boys who have been raped and killed. He now begins to feel that Victor Cracke might be a serial killer and together with the ex-cop and his daughter his life takes a turn when he begins to search for Cracke in need to find out if he is what his drawings indicate.
The book has two parts: The present and interludes beginning in 1847 when Solomon Mueller tries to make a living in the USA. It shows how the family Mueller, later Muller built an empire of companies and money. It really gets interesting when it comes to little boy, David Muller, Ethan's father, how he was raised and the terrible secrets his mother and father kept secret for centuries without letting the public know that a "deep shame", a mongoloid child in 1918, has been born into their family.
It tells how strangely and loveless David has been raised by his parents. His discovery that on the fifth floor lived someone who was removed shortly after he made an accidentally discovery. And how he has to deal with it in the 60's.
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In the beginning I didn't care about the book at all. Two thirds into the book I couldn't wait for the next interlude because those were far more interesting than reading about Ethan's attempts to learn about Cracke's whereabouts. More than once I thought about putting it away until the interludes arrived at the point where David sees the hidden Ruth and she is removed from the big house.The story then made sense to me and I think Kellerman did a fine job to built the story on those interludes.
In the end I felt like the present, Ethan's story, is more like an interlude than anything else. I didn't care for him or what he does at all.
What I care for is the intelligent way the story was built by Jesse Kellerman. In the end he made it to close all lose ends and there were a lot.
Rating:
Visit Jesse Kellerman.
Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Putnam Adult (April 10, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0399154590
ISBN-13: 978-0399154591
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