Tue 31 Jan 2023
An Archived Review by Barry Gardner: IAIN PEARS – The Last Judgment.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[3] Comments
IAIN PEARS – The Last Judgment. Jonathan Argyll #4. Scribner, hardcover, 1996. Berkley, paperback, 1999.
I’ve only read one other in this series, and my vague memory of it was that it was a quite decent read, if nothing major.
Expatriate British art dealer Jonathan Argyll, now living in Rome, is having a rough season of it. While in Paris buying some sketches for a museum, he works out a deal with a Parisian dealer — if the dealer will see that the sketches are shipped to America, Argyll will deliver one of the dealer’s paintings to a buyer in Rome.
Nothing could be simpler, right?
Wrong. First someone tries to steal the painting in the train station, and then a murder is connected with it. Then there’s another, and Argyll’s lover, Flavia di Stefano of Rome’s Art Squad, gets involved The Parisian police are strangely obfuscatory, so Argyll and de Stefano follow the trail back to Paris and secrets buried since World War II and into some serious danger.
I enjoy this series. I like the art background (though in one sense there isn’t much of it in this one), I like the European setting, and I like the characters. These aren’t major books by any means, probably on a par with and similar to Aaron Elkins’ Chris Norgren series, but they are enjoyable. In these days of bloated books about serial killers and women in peril, I value my minor pleasures more and more.
The Jonathan Argyll series —
1. The Raphael Affair (1990)
2. The Titian Committee (1991)
3. The Bernini Bust (1992)
4. The Last Judgement (1993)
5. Giotto’s Hand (1994)
6. Death and Restoration (1996)
7. The Immaculate Deception (2000)
February 1st, 2023 at 8:57 pm
I was a much bigger fan of this series than Barry, but he still does it justice.
Steve Berry’s Cotton Malone books are along the same line though not as witty or learned (and much more in the Clive Cussler line) despite being entertaining.
It’s a shame no one made a series out of these.
Pears went on to write a pretty big bestseller AN INSTANCE OF THE FINGERPOST whose plot proved a bit too inflammatory for film.
February 1st, 2023 at 9:19 pm
High art. Classy stories. A perfect combination.
February 16th, 2023 at 1:42 pm
I found these rather slight, compared to his more serious non-series works like the aforementioned Fingerpost, his historical drama The Dream of Scipio (split between the 5th-century collapse of the Roman Empire, the Black Death, and the Second World War) and his unnerving novella The Portrait.