ELIZABETH LOWELL – Blue Smoke and Murder.

Avon, paperback reprint; 1st printing, April 2009. Hardcover edition: William Morrow, June 2008.

   This is one of those long (over 400 pages) novels of romantic suspense that I often buy because they look interesting and end up never reading because they simply look too long and maybe not so interesting after all when I get them home and out of the Barnes & Noble bag.

   This one’s an exception – by which I do not mean exceptional, but it’s in many ways quite acceptable – because I did start reading it late one evening and didn’t put it down until I’d read about a quarter of the way through. Quite acceptable, that is, until … and I’ll get to that soon.

   The background is what intrigued me at first – that being an inside look at the puffery and other hi-jinks (mostly illegal) that go on in the art business, or at least the auction end of it — which is maybe the most of it, at least as far as the where the money is.

   Hence the “blue smoke” of the title, and there is quite a bit of it, since over 400 pages is quite a large number of pages to fill – but not in an uninteresting fashion, mind you.

   The story: when Jill Breck, who is one of those highly efficient and independent young women who may appear more often in fiction than they do in the real world – she has a degree in art but spends her days as a rapid-river travel guide on the Colorado River – but when she finds herself in a jam, she calls on the highly expensive St. Kilda Consulting agency, whose operatives have figured in several other of Ms Lowell’s earlier books.

   Jill’s great-aunt has died, under semi-suspicious circumstances, as it happens, although the authorities do not think so, but when Jill tries to investigate the value of a painting her great-aunt had had for a long time, she is both poopoohed badly and threatened, also badly.

   It is the latter, the threat, this is, that has her concerned. St. Kilda sends Zach Balfour to act as her bodyguard and to otherwise give her all-around assistance. Bodyguards in novels like these often end up getting closer to the bodies they are guarding than would be professionally correct, and this novel is no exception — but without the abundance of graphic details that may inhabit other books of this same genre.

   From a masculine perspective, I thought Jill would be a good person to learn to known, but that the two leading males were far too shallow: too much macho, not enough finesse. (Truth in Lending: I have neither.)

   Nonetheless, the story is OK, if not more than adequate, until the action begins, which is when it goes off the track entirely. Why let the leading lady go off by herself into such an obvious trap? And what really happened anyway, other than the villain simply going nutso?

   I’d have thought that a much more subtle ending was in order — there should have been a way to get some actual auction action involved. That’s what I was waiting for — not the usual TV stuff with cars, planes, police cars, guns and a dumpy sex ranch with a convenient ravine behind it. I can watch that sort of stuff on the boob tube almost every night in the week.

   When I read a book I want something a tad more clever than this. More than a tad, in fact.

      St. Kilda Consulting

1. Always Time to Die. Morrow, 2005; Avon, 2006.
2. The Wrong Hostage. Morrow, 2006; Avon, 2007.
3. Innocent as Sin. Morrow, 2007; Avon, 2008.

4. Blue Smoke and Murder. Morrow, 2008; Avon, 2009.