Blue Smoke and Murder
A picture is worth a thousand words&#x2014;and millions of dollars&#x2014;in Lowell&#x2019;s new romantic thriller. In the novel&#x2019;s early pages, Arizona river-rafting guide Jill Breck saves the life of Lane Faroe, whose father runs St. Kilda Consulting, a powerful private security firm. Jill&#x2019;s heart-stopping heroics earn the eternal gratitude of the elder Faroe, who promises her the services of his company should she ever get in a jam. So when her aunt perishes in a suspicious fire, Jill calls St. Kilda right away. (She suspects the blaze is connected to paintings kept hidden by her late eccentric mother, the sometime lover of legendary western landscape painter Thomas Dunstan.) Protection arrives in the form of sexy St. Kilda operative Zach Balfour, who teams with Jill to determine the provenance of the paintings. Though her plot is too contrived, Lowell (The Wrong Hostage, 2006) provides intriguing insight into the lucrative and fiercely competitive world of art collecting, where strokes of the brush can lead to brushes with death. --Allison Block