3 out of 4 stars
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The Girl Who Knew Da Vinci is the first book in Belle Ami’s Out of Time Thriller series.
Art historian Angela Renatus has landed her dream job -- only to have it turn into a nightmare. Besides dealing with an obnoxious boss, she begins having blackouts and strange dreams of a Da Vinci painting that supposedly doesn’t exist. She teams up with Alex Caine -- a detective who is looking for this very painting for a client -- to get to the bottom of the strange events and visions. Together they follow clues from Angela’s dreams and from the information Alex’s client has given him. Alarmingly, someone else is also searching for the painting, someone with plenty of power, resources…and greed.
The author convincingly makes the incredible in this story, credible, at least for the duration of the tale. The source of Angela’s dreams may strike you as fantastical at first, but the author presents it all in such a way as to make you think, “There could be more than we know in this life, do we really know for sure?” It leads to some amusingly strange scenarios too, as in when Alex requested that Angela “Tell me about the New Sacristy, where I’m buried.”
Since this is about art and art history, there are many references to famous works, building styles, and famous sites. The author wrote intriguingly enough about these to make me search for pictures of many of them so that I could enjoy them as much as she and her characters obviously do. Not only did I enjoy the story, I learned quite a bit too. I had never before considered that staircases could be specific styles; I knew of different styles but it had never occurred to me that someone had specifically designed them.
Angela and Alex carried on quite a steamy relationship. There is a lot of sex in this book, along with the typical romantic idea found in women’s novels of the man being “turned on” by pretty much every little gesture the woman makes. Angela was surprised to find herself feeling the same way about him more often than she expected. These two were definitely immersed in the honeymoon stage! I personally would have preferred doing without the porn, but I suppose many people like it. The relationship played a large part in the story; without it, events would have never unfolded as they did, so it does fit the storyline.
There are too many punctuation errors, and several misused words. For example, I found ”Cyprus trees” instead of “Cypress”, “Eifel Tower” instead of “Eiffel” (Eifel is the name of a national park in Germany), and “rod iron” instead of “wrought iron”. For me, this is a 3 out of 4 star book. Though I was disappointed that the sex scenes took up so much of it, if you can overlook (or enjoy) those, this was a captivating story. I enjoyed the plot, the characters, definitely the settings and information. You don’t need to be an art expert to love this, though you may want to become one after you read it. I look forward to reading more of the series.
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The Girl Who Knew Da Vinci
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