Resurrected Review: The Balmoral Nude, by Carolyn Coker

Here's a review I did for my old blog back in 2009, published unrevised. I understand that the author died not too long after that, in 2011. It's a minor work, but so be it!

Resurrected Review: The Balmoral Nude, by Carolyn Coker

by Rich Horton

Back in the early 90s I joined a paperback mystery book club on a trial basis but quickly cancelled my membership. One of the books I received and didn't then read was Carolyn Coker's The Balmoral Nude, a 1990 novel reprinted in paper in 1993. I picked it out of my bookshelves for hard to understand reasons this weekend and figured I'd read it. And it's not too bad, though nothing earthshaking. The heroine, sort of, is Andrea Perkins, an American art restorer who I believe appeared in other Coker novels. [She did -- some five books total.] In this book she is in London doing some work for the Victoria and Albert Museum. She bumps into an old boyfriend, Clayton Foley, who has married a rich Englishwoman, Deborah Fetherston. Deborah's ancestor, Cecil Fetherston, was a second-rate Victorian painter who was executed for murdering a prostitute. Fetherston started a gallery that remains in the family, and they have recently found some old drawings by Fetherston, which they believe can be sold for a tidy sum, particularly the one called "The Balmoral Nude". Clayton and Deborah hire Andrea to restore the drawings before the sale. It soon becomes clear that there are two major bidders: an American nouveau riche couple, and an English academic who wants to use the drawings in his new book about William Gladstone (who was a witness to Fetherston murdering the prostitute). 

It soon becomes clear that someone plans to acquire the drawings by foul means -- one is stolen from Andrea's lab, and another attempt is made which results in the accidental death of a woman who resembles Andrea. And behind the scenes, as it were, we learn that a shadowy woman is being urged by her lover to kill someone in order to get ahold of the drawings -- or perhaps for some other reason? There are three women who seem to be suspects -- the American couple's rackety daughter, who is fooling around with Deborah Fetherston's rackety son; a TV producer who seems to be trying to sleep her way to the top, and who gets embroiled in some controversy about the potential sale of the pictures; and the manager of the Fetherston gallery. Plus Clayton is a shady figure -- already putting moves on Andrea despite having long before rudely ended there previous relationship, and also caught in an embrace with the American daughter. 

It's one of those mystery novels where the main murder doesn't occur until perhaps 3/4 through the book (in fact, in a sense it doesn't occur until perhaps much later, as the victim ends up in a coma). And it's also one of those mystery novels -- all too many, for my taste -- where the murder isn't resolved until the criminal gives it away by committing another murder. I found it breezily readable, but not great. Andrea is far too passive ... she has little to do at all with solving the crime. (In fact, no one does, really -- as I said the murderer gives it away by committing another murder.) There is one nice touch -- a cute resolution to the mystery of the drawing itself, the "Balmoral Nude".