The Killing Art, The Murder Notebook, and Anatomy of Fear.
Santlofer applied the Page 69 Test to his latest novel, The Lost Van Gogh, and reported the following:
When I first looked at page 69 of The Lost Van Gogh, I didn’t think it was particularly important to the book. But I was wrong. The page contains several crucial plot points. It is the last page of a chapter, the two male protagonists, downtown artist Luke Perrone and ex-INTERPOL analyst John Washington Smith, are heading downtown on Manhattan’s Bowery. In a page of mostly dialogue, we learn that Smith has “people” in Amsterdam combing the black market to see if a Van Gogh painting is being offered for sale. Also, that Luke’s girlfriend, Alex, has an appointment at the Van Gogh Museum, in Amsterdam, to find out if the painting she and Luke found is a real Van Gogh or a forgery. So, we learn the gist of the story, the search for a “lost” Van Gogh, that the protagonists are going to Amsterdam, and they will be dealing with the art world underground, which sounds ominous, and it is.Visit Jonathan Santlofer's website.
What we haven’t learned from this page, is the painting’s backstory: when Van Gogh painted it, how it ended up in the US, or how Luke and Alex found it only to have it stolen again. Nor do we know that the painting had been hidden under another painting, but I am not spoiling much because the reader learns this right away in a prologue set in 1945, as a French resistance fighter and artist paints over a famous painting.
Or that it’s a Nazi-looted artwork and several people are looking for it, including the son of a Hitler appointed art dealer who will stop at nothing, including murder, to acquire it. How Luke and Alex, and Smith, who, for many pages, appear to be at cross-purposes, are swept up in this dangerous contemporary tale of post-war stolen art, or if they will survive it, are the questions that drive a story which mixes historical fact with fiction, toward a dramatic and explosive ending.
--Marshal Zeringue
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