He left the battlefield for the artworld—and found a different kind of war. Former navy intel sleuth Julian Peale turns art-crime investigator.
Incident at Devil’s Finger: A Novel-No.3
After an apparent attempt to harm the performance artist Magnifica, Julian Peale tries to penetrate the colorful art scene around her and find the elusive culprit.
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ON A BEAUTIFUL JUNE DAY, the famous performance artist Magnifica is set to jump from a helicopter and parachute down through the Red Rock Pinnacle monuments of Sedona, Arizona. What the large and excited crowd sees instead is the massive explosion and collapse of Devil’s Finger, a thousand-foot Red Rock pinnacle.
Art sleuth Julian Peale is on the case, looking where the authorities are not—into the mysterious artworld ties to Magnifica. There’s a New York art patron, the Wall Street gambler, a cyberpunk hack, a Russian art dealer with mob ties, two rival tech millionaires, and a wealthy hippy still living in the Age of Aquarius. The artist Magnifica—Mary Saville by birth—has retreated into the shadows with her copter pilot with plans to bolster her fame. She may be heir to a fortune gathered up by her ailing mother, the once-famous artist Sophia Saville.
In search for answers, Peale moves through the LA art scene, the tech world of San Francisco, the gamers conventions in Las Vegas, the underworld of art betting and Russian organized crime, and finally to the famed counter-cultural festival in the desert of Nevada, the Oracle of Fire—where Magnifica has audacious plans to crash the party. As the dust settles in a Chicago courtroom, all the motives in this art world menagerie are revealed—especially, who blew up Devil’s Finger?
by Larry Witham
The Silk Road Affair: A Novel-No. 2
US agents Julian Peale and Grace Ho launch a mission of intrigue into modern China in search of stolen art amid a global contest for cultural power.
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MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS after a famed Boston art collection is stolen, Washington learns that it has turned up in the People’s Republic of China—just as Sino-American relations are at a tipping point. To retrieve the artifacts, a covert mission is handed to retired military sleuths Julian Peale and Chinese-American Grace Ho, both art specialists. From Washington to China’s great western desert, and from Boston’s lofty art museums to modernist Shanghai, the search is on.
Beijing has meanwhile launched an audacious plan to recover lost Chinese ar stolen by the West a century earlier. Not only do Peale and Ho have to iron out their own cultural differences and approaches to espionage, the highest circle of the Beijing government is caught in a web of intrigue between the top leader and two powerful women vying for control of China’s cultural policy.
From the annals of art history to China’s world ambitions through “soft power,” The Silk Road Affair travels a historic legacy up to the present, from the Han Dynasty to the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square—and on to China Inc. Recovery of the stolen art, its return to the United States, and the political direction of the world’s largest country hang in the balance as Peale and Ho wind their way through the puzzle that is modern China.
Gallery Pieces: An Art Mystery-No. 1
Art forgery and theft embroil Julian Peale in an investigation stretching from the back streets of Manhattan to the tony art scene of London—and to a masterpiece stolen in WWII.
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IN HIS FORTIES, JULIAN PEALE is getting a fresh start. Formerly in Navy intelligence, he’s cast his lot in the New York art world. Hes landed a job with the venerable Medici Studios, which also contracts with the NYPD and FBI. On a winter morning, they’ve run a sting operation to track Russian art smugglers. The caper goes awry, but an odd bit of evidence remains: four art catalogs with graffiti markings.
So begins Gallery Pieces, a story that will keep readers guessing until the end. Peale follows the clues where they lead. He meets a heavy at the Miami Art Fair, chases a mystery bidder at Merriweathers auction in Manhattan, and crosses paths with a Brooklyn performance artist whose pranks are dangerously entangled in the Russian intrigues. Step by step, Peale enters an art world permeated not only by the avant-garde, but by the Russian mob, hackers, forgers, hipsters, and the history of art looting in Europe during WWII.
When Peale least expects it, the catalogs lead him on another trail. He is drawn into a long-forgotten mystery surrounding his grandfather, Maxwell Peale, who had been a monuments man, a soldier who helped reclaim art looted by the Nazis. Peale is on his way to discovering paintings stolen in postwar Europe. Finding the culprits, however, brings him closer to home than he’d imagined.
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Larry Witham is the author of eighteen books, an award-winning journalist and by avocation a fine art painter. He lives in the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C. Visit him at www.larrywitham.com.