A Portrait of Decadence

Let’s say you are a young English lawyer of respectable birth but little money, taking time off from your practice to lounge around early 20th-century Europe. Your name is Revel, and you live up to this moniker by staying up late, sleeping in and spending the interval with attractive females, all of whom find you irresistible. One morning, as you contemplate sightseeing in Venice, Italy, you receive a summons from a former schoolmate at the local consulate. You are now an unofficial diplomat, sent to the house of the powerful, decadent Casimiri to unravel their papers--and their secrets.

Jane Jakeman’s In the City of Dark Waters (Berkley Prime Crime) is less a mystery than a thriller. The police are corrupt buffoons, the supporting cast is menacing, and the hero is an innocent figure thrust into confusion. The only character connecting this book to 2005’s acclaimed In the Kingdom of Mists is the French impressionist painter Claude Monet, a man saddled with failing eyesight and weary middle age. Unlike Stephanie Barron’s Jane Austen mysteries (Jane and the Barque of Frailty), which recast the English author as a society detective, Jakeman’s Monet books are standalone puzzles wrapped around the actual events of Monet’s life. The results are an odd blend of genuine art history and gruesome fictional crime.

In the Kingdom of Mists starred the city of London; In the City of Dark Waters features Venice in 1908. Characters are incidental, really, to this portrait of a fetid, decaying city full of gossip and medieval mores. Monet and his wife, Alice, have left Paris in the wake of a mysterious family murder; as the lawyer Revel Callender discovers, an eerily similar murder has happened in the Casimiri family. Were both homicides based on a play by Shelley? Can Revel really find true love with Clara, the daughter of the Casimiri? And what season is it--the sweltering humidity of summer, or the foggy damp of fall? Jakeman, a British journalist and art historian (who also writes the Lord Ambrose mysteries, including Fool’s Gold) can’t decide, so she offers both in the same day. As in Monet’s paintings, atmosphere is more important than detail.

In a contrived twist, Monet hires Callender to go to Paris and check on the progress of the murder investigation there. Jakeman isn’t as interested in Paris, so Callender’s time there feels forced. The Monet murder--the stabbing of Monet’s brother-in-law--is historical, and remains unsolved. Jakeman doesn’t suggest a solution, though, preferring to concentrate on her mirror-image killing in Venice. Torture, incest, and ritual slayings there make for a very modern-feeling mystery, swathed in pastel descriptions. Monet refuses to paint the suspicious characters he sees, dabbing on blots of dark paint instead. And Jakeman does the same, her characters mere outlines on a canvas thick with melodrama.--Caroline Cummins