Gideon's Art - Gideon, Bk 17 Author:J. J. Marric (John Creasey) "We can collect twenty-five thousand pounds apiece, just for stealing it," said de Courvier. — It was a Velazquez, one of the most valuable and renowned pictures in London's National Gallery. — Three of them were planning to steal it--de Corvier, a prim, almost dandified man; Slater, who was neither prim nor dandified; and Jenkins, w... more »ell known to the police.
Jenkins' daughter, Lucy, worked in a shop on King's Road in Chelsea, for an elderly man named Jim Fisk.
The Fisks were more or less Lucy's family now (she lived in a small room at the back of the shop), and the small shop--which sold and cleaned paintings, made frames, and was of not much importance in the art world--was the center of Lucy's present quiet and rather uneventful life.
Uneventful it had been--but that was going to change.
Christine Falconer's life had been rather quiet and uneventful until recently, too. She was the only child of Lord and Lady Falconer. Their house in Mayfair, filled with valuable works of art, had seemed to Christine so confining that she had, without her parents' (certainly without her father's) knowledge, made some wild, and even dangerous, new friends.
Scotland Yard had long been aware that the London art world was astir with and unusual amount of activity, but it was not until the Velazquez was stolen that Commander George Gideon himself became involved in the Yard's anxieties about the situation.
The art thieves were not only intelligent, they were vicious and determined--and the London police force, which had other worries on their hands, found themselves using all their skills, and their best men, in an effort to catch the culprits.
This is a fast, many-faceted story, full of twists and turns, and surprises.« less