«Killing for Klimt» by Alessandra Comini

In this first in the Megan Crespi Mystery Series, retired art history professor Megan Crespi, an expert on the Viennese artist Gustav Klimt, becomes involved in a race to recover the Secretum, a “shameful, secret panel” stolen from the artist’s studio the night after his death in February of 1918. Her travels, at the behest of New York’s Moderne Galerie Museum, owner of the famed 1907 “golden” Klimt portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, take her from the high desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Switzerland’s Ascona, as well as to New York, Vienna, Helsinki, Paris, Montreal, and Girdwood, Alaska. Megan is shadowed by two different assassins hired by fanatical Günther Winter. Owner of Alaska’s Alpenglow Hotel, he keeps his secret art collection in an annex basement. Several killings occur involving the interested criminal parties and naïve owners of Klimt artworks. Finally setting up a trade—Winter’s Secretum for the golden Adele—Crespi and two colleagues fly to Alaska. They bring with them two crates: one purporting to contain the Adele portrait, and a larger one to receive the Secretum panel. But there, greed leads to unexpected and colossal consequences. Will Megan survive the final killing for Klimt?