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Cargando... The Vatican Rip (Lovejoy Mystery) (1981)por Jonathan Gash
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. A mystery set in Vatican City involves a commission to Lovejoy to steal an antique table from the Vatican. A highly improbable plot, but the information about antiques - both forgeries and the real thing - give a lot of interest to Gash's stories. Lovejoy wasn't so much the lovable rogue in this one, especially when he walloped an old lady! Although the old lady was just as much a rogue as Lovejoy, it was shocking. It appears there were no adverse effects so maybe it didn't hold any force. The rest of the story was ok, but this episode stuck in my mind. http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2000448.html Lovejoy is at his most psychopathic here, gratuitously violent to bad guys and to women, and so utterly besotted with antiques as to be unaware of any other person's feelings. Gash redeems the novel as a reading experience with loving detail on Rome, on the Vatican and on Lovejoy's audacious plan to rip an exhibit from the tightly guarded city-state, and also by Lovejoy getting a mildly comical if emotionally improbable comeuppance at the end, after the bad guys have met their just deserts. But I think the narrator's sheer unpleasantness makes it a weaker entry in the series.
Things are finally looking up for Gash's so-so Lovejoy series--because this new case for seedy, sexy narrator-hero Lovejoy, the savviest antique dealer in East Anglia, shows marked improvement in two vital areas: Lovejoy himself is for the first time more engaging than obnoxious; and his lectures on antiques have now become an integral part of the story, not extraneous interruptions. The setup: an enigmatic toughie named Arcellano blackmails/threatens Lovejoy into undertaking a near-hopeless-mission: he's to steal a Chippendale rent table (supposedly Arcellano family property) from. . . the Vatican! Impossible--even with the crash-course in Italian which Arcellano forces Lovejoy to take. But Lovejoy knows he'd better come through or else--because soon after he gets to Rome, his contact turns up dead in the Colosseum (apparently killed by Arcellano's thugs). So the caper is on: Lovejoy gets himself a base of operations by working for a comically intrigue-ridden antiques shop; he gets street-wise help from local thief Anna (who masquerades as an old crone); and the heist involves a faked medical emergency in a cafeteria near the Vatican Museum, a fake Chippendale constructed by Lovejoy, and considerable acrobatics. Plus: a not-really-surprising twist (who is Arcellano really?) waiting at the end. All in all, the best Lovejoy yet: not very plausible--but active, amusing, lightly informative, and without the snarling/macho posing which has been such a turn-off in previous outings.
In this fast-paced and witty mystery, Lovejoy is asked to recover a family heirloom. Unfortunately, the Chippendale table in question now sits in the Vatican. Though matters of protocol, a brutal murder, and several romantic entanglements slow his progress, Lovejoy once again triumphs, finding his way to a most ingenious solution. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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Sadly, Lovejoy is much more down to earth, honest money grabbing dodgy dealer, Tinker is a repulsive old soak and the other favourites, non existent. I am thus biased against Mr Gash's book from the first page. Whether this caused me not to concentrate sufficiently upon the plot, but I found this story to jump occasionally, in ways that I didn't quite understand.
That's my biased opinion. ( )