Iain Pears Books In Order

The Raphael Affair

The novel which began Iain Pears’s acclaimed art crime series, introducing General Bottando and Flavia di Stefano of the Italian National Art Theft Squad. When English art historian, Jonathan Argyll, is caught breaking into a church in Rome, he has an astonishing story to tell. He claims that the church contains a genuine Raphael, hidden under a painting by Mantini. Further investigation reveals that the painting has disappeared…
to reappear later in the hands of top English art dealer, Edward Byrnes. Soon Byrnes is able to unveil the Raphael before an amazed world. But how had he found out about the hidden masterpiece? And there is also the curious matter of the forger whose safety deposit box contains some highly suspicious sketches. Then a hideous act of vandalism is perpetrated. Murder is to follow…
and General Bottando of Italy’s Art Theft Squad faces the most critical challenge of his whole career.

The Titian Committee

From New York Times bestselling author Iain Pears…
Flavia di Stefano of Rome’s Art Theft Squad and art historian Jonathan Argyll have charmed mystery readers around the world. Their latest case is baffling to the extreme, when clues from a Titian researcher’s death by mugging point to murder and a criminal conspiracy…
‘ An elegant mystery…
but the real work of art here is the plot, a piece of structural engineering any artist would envy.’ New York Times ‘Light and sassy…
Agatha would have loved it.’ Los Angeles Times Iain Pears is the author of the highly acclaimed New York Times bestseller An Instance of the Fingerpost

The Bernini Bust

British art historian Jonathan Argyll is in sunny Los Angeles conducting some profitable business with the Moresby Museum. Then the museum’s owner is murdered and a Bernini bust disappears. And while awaiting the arrival of his friends from the Italian National Art Theft Squad, Jonathan finds himself targeted by the killer…

The Last Judgement

Iain Pears who ‘exhibits quite a masterful touch at suspensful storytelling’ has delighted fans and critics alike with his charming mystery novels featuring art dealer Jonathan Argyll. In The Last Judgement, Argyll agrees to transport a decidedly nondescript painting from a gallery in Paris to its new owner in Rome. But when his mission is plagued by robbery and murder, Argyll must investigate the dark secrets in the painting’s past before someone tries to put him out of the picture for good.

Giotto’s Hand

General Bottando of Rome’s Art Theft Squad believes a lone criminal mastermind dubbed ‘Giotto’ has been stealing priceless Renaissance art for over 30 years. But his theory is scorned by archrival Corrado Argan, a bureaucrat more interested in politics than policing. Bottando’s right hand, the beautiful Flavia di Stefano, quickly locates a possible culprit but he’s in England. Since the conniving Argan considers even a trip across town an unnecessary expense for Bottando’s squad, Flavia must rely on her fianc , Jonathan Argyll. In England on business, he finds the suspect suspiciously dead. That’s a pity especially for Jonathan. Were he not on the scene raving about art thefts and coincidences the police may have ruled that the deceased had a few too many and tripped on a loose stair. Now, Jonathan’s passport has been lifted until Her Majesty’s magistrate is satisfied that he has told all he knows…

Death and Restoration

General Bottando can’t believe his rotten luck. He has just been promoted to a position that’s heavy on bureaucratic duties but disturbingly light on investigative responsibilities. As if that wasn’t annoying enough, he’s received a tip about a planned raid at a nearby monastery. He’s relying on his colleague Flavia di Stefano and her art expert fianc , Jonathan Argyll, to thwart the plot but both are beyond baffled. The only valuable item in the monastery’s art collection is a supposed Caravaggio that’s currently being restored. There are no solid suspects unless you count the endearing art thief, the flagrantly flamboyant ‘Rottweiler of Restoration,’ and the strangely shady icon expert. And there’s really no reason to cause an unholy uproar until someone commits an unconscionable crime…

The Immaculate Deception

From the acclaimed author of ‘An Instance of the Fingerpost’ ‘may well be the best ‘historical mystery’ ever written,’ said ‘The Boston Globe’ comes a luminous new Jonathan Argyll/Flavia di Stefano crime novel set against the richly evocative backdrop of Rome and Tuscany. In his first new novel since ‘An Instance of the Fingerpost’ became an international bestseller, Iain Pears transports us to Rome, where an impudent thief has stolen a politically sensitive painting on loan from a foreign museum. Summoned to see the prime minister, Flavia di Stefano, acting head of Italy’s Art Theft Squad, is told to retrieve the painting without publicity or payment of ransom. But does the prime minister mean what he says? And why was this particular painting stolen? Faced with a case sure to cause her grief, Flavia turns to her mentor, General Taddeo Bottando, who has a wholly unexpected view of the situation. Flavia’s husband of four weeks, art historian Jonathan Argyll, is busy, meanwhile, with a mission of his own. As a gift to the soon to retire Bottando, Jonathan will track down the provenance of a small Renaissance painting, an Immaculate Conception, now hanging on Bottando’s wall. Who owned the painting over the years, and how did it come into Bottando’s hands? Flavia’s search for an art thief soon becomes a hunt for a killer, while Jonathan’s probe uncovers some startling secrets and an unlikely alliance as poignant as it is surprising. Absorbing, witty, ingeniously plotted, ‘The Immaculate Deception‘ is stylish entertainment from a justly celebrated author.

An Instance of the Fingerpost

Now in trade, the New York Times bestseller that ‘may well be the best ‘historical mystery’ ever written.’ The Sunday Boston Globe’It is 1663, and England is wracked with intrigue and civil strife. When an Oxford don is murdered, it seems at first that the incident can have nothing to do with great matters of church and state…
. Yet, little is as it seems in this gripping novel, which dramatizes the ways in which witnesses can see the same events yet remember them falsely. Each of four narrators a Venetian medical student, a young man intent on proving his late father innocent of treason, a cryptographer, and an archivist fingers a different culprit…
an erudite and entertaining tour de force.’ People’Enthralling.’ San Francisco Chronicle Book Review’Ingenious.’ The Philadelphia Inquirer’Successful literary thrillers in the mold of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose are the stuff of a publisher’s dreams, and in Pears’ novel they may have found a near perfect example of the genre…
Pears, with a painstaking, almost forensic attention to detail, constructs his world like a master painter…
‘ New York Times’Fascinating…
quite extraordinary…
elevates the murder mystery to the category of high art.’ Los Angeles Times Book Review’Brings not merely a huge cast of characters but a whole century vividly to life.’ Newsweek

The Dream of Scipio

‘May well be the best historical mystery ever written,’ proclaimed The Sunday Boston Globe about Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost, while Booklist called its publication ‘a major literary event.’ Iain Pears’s international bestseller was greeted with front page reviews ‘A crafty, utterly mesmerizing intellectual thriller’ The Washington Post Book World, named a New York Times Notable Book, and hailed as a Book to Remember by the New York Public Library. Now he returns with a greatly anticipated novel that is so brilliantly constructed, the author himself describes it as ‘a complexity.’ The centuries are the fifth the final days of the Roman Empire; the fourteenth the years of the Black Death; and the twentieth World War II. The setting for each is the same Provence and each has at its heart a love story. The narratives intertwine seamlessly, but what joins them thematically is an ancient text ‘The Dream of Scipio‘ a work of neo Platonism that poses timeless philosophical questions. What is the obligation of the individual in a society under siege? What is the role of learning when civilization itself is threatened, whether by acts of man or nature? Does virtue lie more in engagement or in neutrality? ‘Power without wisdom is tyranny; wisdom without power is pointless,’ warns one of Pears’s characters.

The Portrait

A perfectly rendered short novel of suspense about a painter driven to extremes.

An influential art critic in the early years of the twentieth century journeys from London to the rustic, remote island of Houat, off France’s northwest coast, to sit for a portrait painted by an old friend, a gifted but tormented artist living in self-imposed exile. Over the course of the sitting, the painter recalls their years of friendship, the double-edged gift of the critic’s patronage, the power he wielded over aspiring artists, and his apparent callousness in anointing the careers of some and devastating the lives of others. The balance of power between the two men shifts dramatically as the critic becomes a passive subject, while the painter struggles to capture the character of the man, as well as his image, on canvas.

Reminiscing with ease and familiarity one minute, with anger and menace the next, the painter eventually reveals why he has accepted the commission of this portrait, why he left London suddenly and mysteriously at the height of his success, and why now, with dark determination, he feels ready to return.

Set against the dramatic, untamed landscape of Brittany during one of the most explosive periods in art history, The Portrait is rich with atmosphere and suggestion, psychological complexity, and marvelous detail. It is a novel you will want to begin again immediately after turning the last chilling page, to read once more with a watchful eye and appreciate the hand of an ingenious storyteller at work.

Stone’s Fall

A return to the form that launched Iain Pears onto bestseller lists around the world: a vast historical mystery, marvelous in its ambition and ingenius in its complexity.

In his most dazzling novel since the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears tells the story of John Stone, financier and arms dealer, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War One he was able to manipulate markets, industries, and indeed entire countries and continents.

A panoramic novel with a riveting mystery at its heart, Stone’s Fall is a quest to discover how and why John Stone dies, falling out of a window at his London home.

Chronologically, it moves backwards from London in 1909 to Paris in 1890, and finally to Venice in 1867 and in the process the quest to uncover the truth plays out against the backdrop of the evolution of high stakes international finance, Europe s first great age of espionage, and the start of the twentieth century s arms race.

Like Fingerpost, Stone s Fall is an intricately plotted and richly satisfying puzzle an erudite work of history and fiction that feels utterly true and oddly timely and marks the triumphant return of one of the world s great storytellers.

From the Hardcover edition.