Awards
2006 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime
Synopses & Reviews
In the predawn gloom of a February day in 1994, two thieves entered the National Gallery in Oslo. They snatched one of the world's most famous paintings, Edvard Munch's
The Scream, and fled with their $72 million trophy. The thieves made sure the world was watching: the Winter Olympics, in Lillehammer, began that same morning. Baffled and humiliated, the Norwegian police called on the world's greatest art detective, a half-English, half-American undercover cop named Charley Hill.
In this rollicking narrative, Edward Dolnick takes us inside the art underworld. The trail leads high and low, and the cast ranges from titled aristocrats to thick-necked thugs. Lord Bath, resplendent in ponytail and velvet jacket, presides over a 9,000-acre estate. David Duddin, a 300-pound fence who once tried to sell a stolen Rembrandt, spins exuberant tales of his misdeeds. We meet Munch, too, a haunted misfit who spends his evenings drinking in the Black Piglet Café and his nights feverishly trying to capture in paint the visions in his head. The most compelling character of all is Charley Hill, an ex-soldier, a would-be priest, and a complicated mix of brilliance, foolhardiness, and charm. The hunt for "The Scream" will either cap his career and rescue one of the world's best-known paintings or end in a fiasco that will dog him forever.
Review
"[A] tightly woven, fast-paced story. Teens interested in art and/or investigative journalism will enjoy this real-life whodunit." School Library Journal
Review
"The various digressions slow the pace a little as we wait for Dolnick to get back to the story of 'The Scream,' which needs no embellishment in its extraordinary twists, screw-ups, coincidences, and quick thinking on the part of Hill and his team of experienced undercover cops." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Where there's art, there are thieves and electrifying stories to tell." Booklist
Review
"Outstanding...fascinating, expertly told, with characters as crisply-drawn as any Rembrandt, and...intrigue...found only in a thriller." Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha
Review
"A fast-paced and beautifully written romp through the world of big-time art crime....A rollicking good ride." Gerard O'Neill, co-author of Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the FBI, and a Devil's Deal on The Rescue Artist
Review
"The Rescue Artist is a masterpiece. Engrossing, entertaining, often surreally hilarious." Mary Roach, author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers on The Rescue Artist
Review
"An entertaining account of the eternal struggle between high art and low cunning." Time magazine
Review
"Riveting...fascinating." Los Angeles Times
Review
"There has never been a better book on art crime." ArtNews
About the Author
Edward Dolnick is author of Down the Great Unknown and Madness on the Couch. A former chief science writer at the Boston Globe>, he has written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. He has two grown sons and lives with his wife near Washington, D.C.