Killing the Emperors: A Robert Amiss/Baronness Jack Troutback Mystery

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Set 2012 · Poisoned Pen Press Inc

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"A raucous send-up of the art world's collectors, critics, curators and especially those postmodernists who call themselves artists."--Kirkus Reviews

Lady (Jack) Troutbeck is missing. So is celebrity curator Sir Henry Fortune and his partner in love and money, louche art dealer Jason Pringle. But panic doesn't begin in the London art world until no one can locate Anastasia Holliday, sensational abject artist; Jake Thorogood, the critic who catapulted her into stardom; or Dr. Hortense Wilde, notorious for having influenced generations of art students to despise craftsmanship. Are these fashionable adopters of conceptual art hostages? If so, why? Ransom? Revenge?

Who will be next? Will it be Sir Nicholas Serota, mighty overlord of British temples of the avant garde? The internationally renowned Young British Artist Damien Hirst, whose dross became platinum? Is Charles Saatchi, mega-rich husband of a TV cook and the genius who took talentless young people and turned them into a winning brand, in danger? When news comes of a New York disappearance, the fears of the art establishment go transatlantic.

But why is Baroness Troutbeck a target? After all, Jack is a standard bearer of conservative values in education and art who recently publicly described admirers of conceptual art as knaves and fools.

Can Jack's friends rescue her before her own worst fantasies are turned into reality and she becomes the next horrifying "hommage murder" satirizing notorious works of art?

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Ruth Dudley Edwards (born 24 May 1944, in Dublin, Ireland) is an Irish historian, a crime novelist, a journalist and a broadcaster, in both Ireland and in the United Kingdom. Edwards was born and brought up in Dublin and educated at University College Dublin, Girton College, Cambridge and Wolfson College, Cambridge. Her nonfiction books include An Atlas of Irish History, James Connolly, Victor Gollancz: A Biography (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist 1843-1993, and The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions. Also a crime fiction writer, her novels include: Corridors of Death, The Saint Valentine's Day Murders, The English School of Murder, and Clubbed to Death.