False Impressions - by Jeffrey Archer

I didn’t know that Van Gogh had cut one of his ears off but then again I hadn’t even heard of him till I got out of the high school. I am sure my drawing teacher must have mentioned him in one of his lectures on the art history but drawing didn’t figure in my list of favorite subjects.

That’s why when I found Vincent Van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear” to be at the center of the plot of Jeffrey Archer’s “False Impressions”, my first impression was “Van Gogh did what?” :-)

Archer’ protagonist, Anna Petrescu, has everything a leading lady of any thriller usually has – beauty, brains, integrity and lot of guts. Oh, and she is a Romanian, for a change. Yep, the same country that Dracula came from. :-) After falling from grace at the Sotheby’s, Dr. Petrescu (a Ph. D. in art history!) is working for a banking concern, Fenston Finance which specializes in loaning out vast amounts to down-on-luck heirs of “old-money” families and later confiscating their priceless inherited paintings when they default on the loans. And the owners are later found dead with their throats ripped out.

When this happens thrice in a row, FBI agent Jack Delaney decides against it being a simple coincidence. The needle of suspicion firmly points at art collector Bryce Fenston and his right hand, a disgraced lawyer called Karl Leapman.

Victoria Wentworth is the latest client of Fenston Finance to end up dead and Bryce Fenston doesn’t lose much time in picking up “Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear” from her mansion. Dr. Petrescu gets fired for sending a report to Victoria suggesting that she could clear up her debt by selling the Self-Portrait to a well-known Japanese collector Mr. Nakamura.

As she is about to leave her office in the North Tower of the World Trade with a cardboard box full of her personal belongings, Al-Qaeda strikes – it’s 9/11! Though she survives the attack she realizes that she is living on borrowed time because she knows it all too well that Bryce Fenston would stop at nothing to secure the Self-Portrait. As she zooms across the cities - London, Bucharest, and Tokyo – she has to save the Van Gogh from falling into wrong hands and also save herself from Fenston’s hired gun, Olga Krantz.

I must say that despite the presence of all the elements that guarantee a slot on the top of the best-seller chart – a beauty with brains who can retain her head when all around her are losing theirs, priceless artwork, a bloodthirsty assassin, a hint of a romance between the damsel-in-distress and the knight in the shining armor and the twists and turns that are supposed to make you dizzy – I didn’t much like this one. I was especially disappointed in Archer’s final twist in the tail – it could have been guessed by kid-next-door.

If nothing else, the novel does live upto its name. Coming from my favorite author, it did give me a False Impression that it would be worth investing my time in! :-(