Description:
In the high-stakes game of authenticating artwork by Jackson Pollock, a bunch of bogus paintings are up for consideration. Private detective TJ Fitzgerald is hired to track down the source.
Brief description: During her career as a director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, New York, Helen A. Harrison began writing mystery novels set in the New York art world. A widely published author of books and articles on art, she enjoys making up stories in which fictional characters interact with real people from her own background and experience as a New York Times art critic, NPR arts commentator, museum curator and practicing artist. Her second novel, An Accidental Corpse, won the 2019 Benjamin Franklin Gold Award for Mystery & Suspense. A New York City native, she and her husband, the artist Roy Nicholson, live in Sag Harbor with the ghost of Roy's beloved studio cat, Mittens.
Review Quotes:
"Helen Harrison knows her way around-upstairs and down-what is generally called the art world. Her forensic examination of the convergence of big money, big egos, and high achievements is based on insider knowledge few could rival. Trust her, but watch your back as you venture into her perilous domain. It is a place where more than one person you'll meet deserves killing and is likely to fall victim to the intrigues that drew them and fellow denizens of the cultural mainstream and its backwaters like flies to a rotting corpse." - Rob Storr, former Dean, Yale School of Art
"A rich cast of characters with all the complexities and charm one could want...informed by a true insider's eye. The writing and plot work [are] excellent." - Bronwen Hruska, author of Accelerated
"Another entertaining mystery from Helen Harrison! Skillfully weaving fact and fiction, A Willful Corpse will keep readers engaged from beginning to end." - Carrie Doyle, author, Hamptons Murder Mysteries; co-founder, Hamptons Whodunit
"The mix of fact and fiction in this art-world thriller by insider Helen Harrison is as fun, fast, and complicated as trying to decipher the missing Jackson Pollock paintings at its core and figuring out which are real and which are fake." - Jonathan Santlofer, bestselling author of The Lost Van Gogh and The Last Mona Lisa