Vincent van Gogh is regarded as one of history's greatest painters, his pieces among the most recognizable (and expensive) works of art in the world, and "the trailblazer of modern art". In The Lost Van Gogh, the debut novel by husband-and-wife team Al and Jean Zerries, the Portrait of Monsieur Trabuc - long thought lost in the nightmares of the Second World War - suddenly turns up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Its arrival is heralded by the near-death of three police officers - one of them being Clay Ryder, the art museums and galleries expert of the New York Police Department Major Case Squad.

 

Ryder's investigations into the sudden reappearance of the painting (why, for example, a $50 million painting would be sent by UPS, why the man who held up the UPS truck would shoot at two uniformed police officers, and who murdered the wife of a very rich art collector) lead him to Dr. Rachel Meredith, the only living descendant of the original owner of Portrait of Monsieur Trabuc. Reluctantly thrust into the spotlight, she views the recovery and safety of the painting a closure to the grief and agony her grandparents endured at the hands of Hitler's SS - in particular, the murderous and inhuman Udo Luscher.

 

But the Trabuc draws ghosts from their graves and sinners out of their sleep: Rachel at first is hounded, and then threatened, by powerful art galleries and collectors that will stop at nothing to add her inheritance to their walls; and the demon that destroyed her family reaches out across generations, through layers of deception, over decades of waiting and planning, to reclaim perhaps the most famous war trophy of all time.

 

There's a really good story in The Lost Van Gogh, and if not for Detective Clay Ryder, it might even be a great story. Ryder is a walking cliché of the unpopular, loner cop among a rabble of Philistines who wouldn't know a painting from a photograph. Zerries does give Ryder a layer of backstory to make him remotely interesting - a beautiful wife who was killed after an argument, and an abusive, sadistic grandfather - but ultimately, it all leads to Clay Ryder, the maverick; Clay Ryder, the misunderstood, outlaw hero.

 

Fresh out of college, Ryder joined the Navy and became a SEAL. While I have the highest respect and admiration for the men and women who wear a uniform and swear an oath of loyalty to their country and their people, Ryder's SEAL training makes him damn near unstoppable. He does occasionally show uncertainty in the face of death, but sometimes you wonder if he's too lucky. He survives car crashes, shootouts, a bombing and an attempted drowning without any long-term physical or psychological effects. Again, I don't doubt that SEAL training comes in handy for these types of things, but it makes for awfully boring literature when your protagonist is the man of steel.

 

The Lost Van Gogh is Al and Jean Zerries' debut novel, and I think it shows. The idea of a highly sought-after van Gogh is a (very) good premise, and the Zerries pull out all the stops for the event: we've got the New York Police Department; a snobbish FBI agent (and we're told he's snobbish because we're not even given his name); the Mossad; the Yakuza (only as a background player); and the SS, the jackbooted, goose-stepping, black-clad monstrosities of history and parody. Since it is impossible to overstate the crimes of the SS, it is only they who (through flashbacks) are presented with any sense of realism. All the dialog between the NYPD officers sounds like it was lifted from cop TV shows and movies from the 1980s, replete with a pissed-off Deputy Inspector, who slowly (but eventually whole-heartedly) joins the Clay Ryder Fan Club.

 

That's another criticism of The Lost Van Gogh, which is that in the end, everybody does live happily ever after (except the bad guys, of course, who are all dead or incarcerated). Rachel Meredith's life is systematically torn apart in one of the novel's few genuinely interesting developments, but when she cuddles the puppy given to her by Ryder at the end of the book, it makes you wonder if everything she endured served any purpose, other than to remind us that the bad guys were, indeed, bad.

 

When I was done with The Lost Van Gogh, I checked out some reviews of it on Amazon.com, to see if I was alone in my disappointment. The first review gave the book 5/5, saying "If you liked Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons (like me), you'll LOVE this book".

 

Houston, I think we found the problem.

 

There is, as I said, a good story in The Lost Van Gogh, and if you can deal with a boring hero, cutout villains and trite dialog ("If you reveal anything about the painting, this criminal won't hesitate to kill you"), you might actually enjoy the book. Ironically, the only character remotely interesting is the bloodthirsty and barbaric Udo Luscher - because despite all we're told of his wartime atrocities, when we finally meet him (and come on, hands up all those who thought he was really dead?), his stony silence and unflappability makes him an infinitely more compelling character than any who came before him. And that, really, is when you know a book is bad - you find yourself rooting for the Nazi.