The Lover's Portrait
Zelda Richardson Mystery Series Book 1
by Jennifer S. Alderson
Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Suspense
A portrait holds the key to recovering a cache of looted artwork, secreted away during World War II, in this captivating historical art thriller set in the 1940s and present-day Amsterdam.
When a Dutch art dealer hides the stock from his gallery – rather than turn it over to his Nazi blackmailer – he pays with his life, leaving a treasure trove of modern masterpieces buried somewhere in Amsterdam, presumably lost forever. That is, until American art history student Zelda Richardson sticks her nose in.
After studying for a year in the Netherlands, Zelda scores an internship at the prestigious Amsterdam Museum, where she works on an exhibition of paintings and sculptures once stolen by the Nazis, lying unclaimed in Dutch museum depots almost seventy years later.
When two women claim the same portrait of a young girl entitled Irises, Zelda is tasked with investigating the painting’s history and soon finds evidence that one of the two women must be lying about her past. Before she can figure out which one and why, Zelda learns about the Dutch art dealer’s concealed collection. And that Irises is the key to finding it.
Her discoveries make her a target of someone willing to steal – and even kill – to find the missing paintings. As the list of suspects grows, Zelda realizes she has to track down the lost collection and unmask a killer if she wants to survive.
Awarded a B.R.A.G. Medallion by indieBRAG's readers in March 2019
Chosen as Chill with a Book’s January 2018 Book of the Month and winner of a Chill with a Book Readers’ Award
One of TripFiction's 10 Favorite Books set in Amsterdam
Silver Cup winner in Rosie's Book Review Team 2017 Awards, Mystery category
Readers’ Favorite 5 star medal
One of The Displaced Nation magazine’s Top 36 Expat Fiction Picks of 2016
One of Women Writers, Women’s Books magazine's Recommended Reads for April 2017.
Set in present day and wartime Amsterdam, this captivating thriller is not just about stolen paintings, but also the lives that were stolen. This art history mystery also describes the plight of homosexuals and Jewish artists in Europe during World War II, as well as the complexities inherent to the restitution of artwork stolen by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.
The Lover's Portrait is Book One in the Zelda Richardson Mystery Series. The amateur sleuth mysteries in this series can be read in any order.
Book Trailer
Rituals of the Dead
Zelda Richardson Mystery Series Book 2
A museum researcher must solve a decades-old murder before she becomes the killer’s next victim in this riveting dual timeline thriller set in Papua and the Netherlands.
Agats, Dutch New Guinea (Papua), 1961: While collecting Asmat artifacts for a New York museum, American anthropologist Nick Mayfield stumbles upon a smuggling ring organized by high-ranking members of the Dutch colonial government and the Catholic Church. Before he can alert the authorities, he vanishes in a mangrove swamp, never to be seen again.
Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 2018: While preparing for an exhibition of Asmat artifacts in a Dutch ethnographic museum, researcher Zelda Richardson finds Nick Mayfield’s journal in a long-forgotten crate. Before Zelda can finish reading the journal, her housemate is brutally murdered and ‘Give back what is not yours’ is scrawled on their living room wall.
Someone wants ancient history to stay that way—and believes murder is the surest way to keep the past buried.
Can she solve a sixty-year-old mystery before decades of deceit, greed, and retribution cost Zelda her life?
Awarded a B.R.A.G. Medallion by indieBRAG's readers in December 2018
One of Amy's Bookshelf Reviews' Top 20 Books of 2018
Winner of a Chill with a Book Readers’ Award, June 2018
A Women Writers, Women’s Books magazine’s Recommended Reads for March 2018
New Apple’s 2018 Summer Book Awards, Official Selection Mystery/Thriller category
BookLife Prize for Fiction 2018, Mystery/Thriller category, rating 8.50
Art, religion and history collide in this edge-of-your-seat museum thriller, Book Two of the Zelda Richardson Mystery Series. The novels in this series can be read in any order.
Marked For Revenge
Zelda Richardson Mystery Series Book 3
An exhilarating adventure set in the Netherlands, Croatia, Italy, Luxembourg, and Turkey about stolen art, the mafia, and a father’s vengeance.
When researcher Zelda Richardson begins working at a local museum, she doesn’t expect to get entangled with an art theft, knocked unconscious by a forger, threatened by the mob, or stalked by drug dealers.
To make matters worse, a Croatian gangster is convinced Zelda knows where a cache of recently pilfered paintings is. She must track down an international gang of art thieves and recover the stolen artwork in order to save those she loves most.
The trouble is, Zelda doesn’t know where to look. Teaming up with art detective Vincent de Graaf may be her only hope at salvation.
The trail of clues leads Zelda and Vincent on a pulse-pounding race across Europe to a dramatic showdown in Turkey that may cost them their lives.
Awarded a Chill with a Book Readers' Award in June 2019
A Women Writers, Women's Books magazine Recommended Reads in June 2019
One of Amy's Bookshelf Reviews Top 20 Reads of 2019
Placed at #30 in ReadFreely's Top 50 Indie Reads of 2019
Chosen as Chill with a Book's June 2019 Cover of the Month
Marked for Revenge is the third book in the Zelda Richardson Mystery Series. The novels in this series can be read in any order.
The Vermeer Deception
Zelda Richardson Mystery Series Book 4
An art historian finds – then loses – a portrait by Johannes Vermeer in this thrilling art mystery set in Munich, Heidelberg, and Amsterdam.
When Zelda Richardson investigates a new lead about a missing portrait by Johannes Vermeer, no one expects her to actually find the painting in a retired art dealer’s home in Munich, Germany. Not her parents visiting from America; her boss, private detective Vincent de Graaf; or the rightful owner of the Nazi-looted artwork.
However, Zelda’s jubilation turns to horror when she arrives to pick up the portrait and finds the art dealer dead and several frames smoldering in his fireplace.
Was the Vermeer a fake and its ‘discovery’ a cruel joke played on a Nazi victim? The Munich police, Zelda’s family, and Vincent certainly think so.
Yet the art dealer’s best friend believes he was murdered and the real Vermeer stolen by an underground network of art looters, one established during World War II and still active today. The problem is, no one believes him – except Zelda.
Zelda soon finds herself in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with immoral art collectors, corrupt dealers, and an all-to-real killer who wants her to stop searching.
Can Zelda uncover the truth about the Vermeer before she is painted out of the picture permanently?
The Vermeer Deception is Book 4 in the Zelda Richardson Mystery Series. The novels in this series can be read in any order.
**On Sale for only $2.99!**
Hi! I am an American expat currently living in Amsterdam. After traveling extensively around Asia, Oceania, and Central America, I moved to Darwin, Australia, before finally settling in the Netherlands. When not writing, you can find me in a museum, biking around Amsterdam, or enjoying a coffee along the canal while planning my next research trip.
My love of travel, art, and culture inspires my award-winning Zelda Richardson Mystery series, Travel Can Be Murder Cozy Mysteries, and standalone stories.
The Lover’s Portrait (Book One) is a suspenseful whodunit about Nazi-looted artwork that transports readers to WWII and present-day Amsterdam. Art, religion, and anthropology collide in Rituals of the Dead (Book Two), a thrilling artifact mystery set in Papua New Guinea and the Netherlands. My pulse-pounding adventure set in the Netherlands, Croatia, Italy, and Turkey— Marked for Revenge (Book Three)—is a story about stolen art, the mafia, and a father’s vengeance.
The Travel Can Be Murder Cozy Mysteries are a funny new series featuring tour guide and amateur sleuth, Lana Hansen. Join Lana as she leads tourists and readers to fascinating cities around the globe on intriguing adventures that, unfortunately for Lana, often turn deadly. Book One— Death on the Danube —takes Lana to Budapest for a New Year’s trip. Can Lana figure out who murdered her fellow tour guide before she too ends up floating in the Danube? Death by Baguette: A Valentine's Day Murder in Paris (Books Two) will be released in February 2020, and Book 3 in May 2020.
I am also the author of Down and Out in Kathmandu , Holiday Gone Wrong , and Notes of a Naive Traveler .
Connect with me on Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or my website.
I have also started a group for readers and writers of travel fiction and non-fiction - Travel By Book. We are a promotion and discussion group active on Facebook with a growing presence here on Goodreads.
Thanks for stopping by!
How
an Exhibition Inspired my Artifact Mystery
By
Jennifer S. Alderson
Rituals
of the Dead: An Artifact Mystery is
the second novel in my Zelda Richardson Mystery series, as well as
the second book set in my adopted hometown of Amsterdam, the
Netherlands. My experiences as an expat, art history student and
collection researcher – as well as the turbulent history of this
amazing city – inspired and informed the storylines, subject
matter, and several characters in The
Lover’s Portrait and
Rituals of the Dead.
Though
the plot of
The Lover’s Portrait
was shaped by several events, exhibitions, archival research and
university lectures, the idea for Rituals
of the Dead
originated from a single exhibition held at the Tropenmuseum in 2008
– Bis
poles: Sculptures of the Rainforest.
Bis
poles and the Tropenmuseum
Four
subjects are central to the narrative – artifact smuggling,
anthropology (physical and cultural), missionaries, and the treatment
of human remains. It was while working on the aforementioned Bis
poles
exhibition that I was introduced to all four.
In
Rituals of the Dead,
a missing anthropologist’s journal is discovered inside a bis pole
crate. As an intern working at the Tropenmuseum, Zelda is tasked with
finding out more about the man’s last days and his connection to
these ritual objects. Her research pulls her into a world of shady
anthropologists, headhunters, missionaries, art collectors, and
smugglers – where the only certainty is that the sins of the past
are never fully erased.
The
Tropenmuseum is an ethnographic and anthropological museum in
Amsterdam. It is also one of three public institutions in the
Netherlands with sizeable collections of Asmat art and artifacts.
Considering the Dutch ruled (the now Indonesian) half of Papua New
Guinea for three hundred years, it’s not really a surprise so many
objects ended up here. That is also why the historical chapters in my
novel take place in 1962, before the Dutch ceded control to the newly
formed government of Indonesia a year later.
Like
Zelda in this novel, I was tasked with finding audiovisual material
suitable for the upcoming exhibition. I searched through many
fascinating archives and photographic collections for images
pertaining to Asmat artifacts, as well as a number of legendary Dutch
missionaries and anthropologists active in Dutch New Guinea. During
my research I came across many bizarre stories about headhunting
raids, crazy explorers and colonial officers that stuck with me long
after the exhibition opened.
Michael
Rockefeller and Dutch New Guinea
Because
two of the Asmat bis poles we were about to display were collected by
the American anthropologist Michael Rockefeller, he was also part of
my research assignment. I soon discovered these poles were donated to
the National Ethnography Museum in Leiden by his parents, to thank
the Dutch government for their help in searching for their missing
son.
Rockefeller’s
name may ring a bell with readers. He was in Papua New Guinea on his
second acquisition trip when he vanished from the face of the earth.
He was also the son of Nelson Rockefeller, then Governor of New York
State, which made his disappearance international news – unusual in
the days before social media. His body has never been found.
I
also learned Rockefeller tended to offer more than the going rate for
artifacts, to the dismay of local missionaries and colonial
authorities. There are even instances recorded in Dutch colonial
documentation of Asmat villagers asking permission to go on a
headhunting raid so they could make a fortune by selling the newly
acquired skulls to Rockefeller.
Artifact
theft and smuggling
At
least Rockefeller paid for the items he collected. The colonial
archives are full of references to anthropologists, colonial
government officials, surveyors, missionary workers, and adventurers
accused of stealing culturally-significant objects from Asmat
villages.
One
example is Carel Groenevelt, a professional collector who acquired
thousands of Asmat artifacts for museums, including fifty of the
seventy-five poles held in Dutch collections. A Dutch missionary
working in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s, Reverend Gerard Zegwaard,
often acted as a middle man for several anthropologists who wished to
barter from Asmat artifacts – including Groenevelt. Despite having
Zegwaard’s help, Groenevelt later admitted to finding poles on the
ground in 1953 and taking them – without asking permission from, or
paying, the locals who carved them. All of the artifacts he collected
are still part of these museums’ collections.
Human
remains in museums
At
the same time we were preparing the Bijs
Poles
exhibition, the Tropenmuseum was wrestling with an extensive
collection of human remains, many of which were collected in the
1930s through the 1960s in Papua New Guinea. As described in my book,
crates of unidentified bones were found in Amsterdam Medical Center’s
basement after it flooded. They had been moved to the hospital in
1973 when anatomical museum Vrolik was being remodeled, placed in the
atomic bomb shelter and left – literally – to rot.
After
they’d been rediscovered, the Tropenmuseum agreed to sort through
them. It took the museum’s staff six years to sort and document
this collection of human remains. Yet once they’d determined where
they’d come from, the museum ran into an unexpected problem. In
contrast to my book, there were no claims laid on any of these
remains, in fact no one wanted them. The question became how to
dispose of the bones in an ethical manner. My internship coincided
with the museum’s organization of an international symposium to
discuss this topic, and attempts to create an exhibition about the
moral dilemmas museums face when displaying human remains.
These
historical facts, people, and real-life coincidences provided me with
a wild cast of characters and events that I used as the basis for a
mystery about bis poles, anthropologists, and artifact smuggling.
"Art-related, Dutch goodies" prize package, includes:
- Playmobil toy of Vermeer's The Milkmaid (from the Rijksmuseum)
- A notebook featuring Vermeer's The Milkmaid on the cover
- A tulip pen
- A fabric bag from a local Amsterdam cafe
No comments:
Post a Comment