Iain Pears Paperback Thriller Mystery Book Lot

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This listing is for Iain Pears Paperback Thriller Mystery Book Lot.

* The Dream of Scipio Paperback

In national bestseller The Dream of Scipio, acclaimed author Iain Pears intertwines three intellectual mysteries, three love stories, and three of the darkest moments in human history. United by a classical text called "The Dream of Scipio," three men struggle to find refuge for their hearts and minds from the madness that surrounds them in the final days of the Roman Empire, in the grim years of the Black Death, and in the direst hours of World War II. An ALA Booklist Editors' Choice.

Like his elegant debut, An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears's The Dream of Scipio is an inventive, gloriously detailed historical novel told from multiple viewpoints. But Pears has set himself an additional challenge by spreading his narrators over several centuries: there's the fifth century French nobleman and bishop, Manlius, a civilized man who has embraced the uncouth Christian faith in order to protect what he holds dear; an 11th-century scholar and troubadour named Olivier de Noyen, the famously ill-fated admirer of a married girl; and Julien Barneuve, an early 20th-century scholar of de Noyen who discovers, through him, a magnificent manuscript of Manlius's called "The Dream of Scipio." Though all three men come from the same small Provençal town, it is this manuscript, derived from the teachings of a wise woman, that links the three narrative threads of Pears's story. At the heart of The Dream of Scipio and, one suspects, at the heart of its author, is the conflict between a classical ideal of learning and the contemplation of beauty, and the noisy, uncivilized, democratizing impulses of the Christian era. A novel of ideas like its predecessor, The Dream of Scipio is neither chilly nor didactic and doesn't shy away from depicting the costs of its narrators' unpopular devotions.

* The Immaculate Deception Paperback

From internationally bestselling author Iain Pears comes the seventh in his Jonathan Argyll series -- an intriguing mystery of love, loss, and artistic license. 

For newlywed and Italian art theft squad head Flavia di Stefano, the honeymoon is over when a painting, borrowed from the Louvre and en route to a celebratory exhibition, is stolen. Desperate to avoid public embarrassment -- and to avoid paying a ransom -- the Italian prime minister leans hard on Flavia to get it back quickly and quietly.  Across town, her husband, art historian Jonathan Argyll, begins an investigation of his own, tracing the past of a small Renaissance painting -- an Immaculate Conception -- owned by Flavia's mentor, retired general Taddeo Bottando. Soon both husband and wife uncover astonishing and chilling secrets, and Flavia's investigation takes a sudden turn from the search for an art thief to the hunt for a murderer.

The success of Pears' majesterial literary thriller An Instance of the Fingerpost (1998) has brought renewed attention to his outstanding series of art mysteries starring erstwhile art-history professor Jonathan Argyll and his wife, Flavia di Stefano, of the Rome police's art theft squad. This seventh in the series may well be the best yet. Change is in the wind from multiple directions: Jonathan and Flavia, only recently married, are stunned to discover they will soon be parents, and Flavia, acting head of the art squad, learns that her mentor and former boss, General Bottando, will be retiring--and she is by no means a sure thing to succeed him as permanent head of the department. Then the bizarre theft of a painting on loan to Italy from the Louvre leads to a decades-old case of murder and political corruption that further ensnares Flavia in a bureaucratic sinkhole. Meanwhile, Argyll is traipsing about Tuscany, where he stumbles into some remarkable discoveries that seem to link Bottando to the stolen painting. Art-themed mysteries possess natural appeal (stealing a painting is such an irresistibly sophisticated crime), but too often the art-history lessons are unsuccessfully melded to the plot. Not so here, as Pears masterfully incorporates the missing painting's history into the fabric of the story. Best of all, though, is his wonderful grasp of the moral ambiguity at the heart of Italian life. Bottando and Flavia possess that uniquely Italian grasp of the inevitability of corruption, and the English Argyll is catching on quite nicely. The result is a wonderfully appealing cast of characters whose abiding distrust of institutions forms the bedrock of their commitment to each other. Despite their profoundly ironic view of the world, Pears' people are by no means melancholy cynics; rather, they possess a joie de vivre that seems to flow from the startling discovery that, even in a world soiled by universal corruption, on the one hand, and deadly idealism, on the other, it's still possible to look at beautiful pictures or enjoy a delicious lunch.

Iain George Pears (born 1 January 1955) is an English art historian, novelist and journalist. Before writing, he worked as a reporter for the BBC, Channel 4 (UK) and ZDF (Germany) and correspondent for Reuters from 1982 to 1990 in Italy, France, UK and US. In 1987 he became a Getty Fellow in the Arts and Humanities at Yale University.

Pears first came to international prominence with his best selling book An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997), which was translated into several languages. He is known for experimenting with different narrative structures, presenting four consecutive versions of the same events in An Instance of the Fingerpost, three stories interleaved in The Dream of Scipio (2002), three stories told in reverse chronological order in Stone's Fall (2009), and allowing the reader to switch between multiple narratives in the electronic book version of Arcadia (2015). He has also written a novel series featuring Jonathan Argyll, art historian.

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